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

That was a very wise decision, Mr Speaker. You're one for one already! I congratulate you on your election to that office. You're going to need a little dustpan and brush to clean up the shattered shards of the Prime Minister's glass jaw and the last remnants of the Treasurer's credibility on the floor over there. We saw once again today from the Prime Minister the same shouting, dishonesty and desperation which increasingly characterise his public commentary on the economy. You can draw a straight line between the blundering and bullying bulldust from question time and this Prime Minister and his failures on the economy for some time now, because, if this Prime Minister won't tell the truth about a trip to Hawaii, about correspondence with the member for Grayndler or about the submarines deal or electric vehicles or vaccine mandates, he can't be trusted with the economic recovery as well. This is too important to the life chances and prospects of the working families of middle Australia to be left in the hands of a Prime Minister who simply cannot be believed.

He was at it again during the course of the last week on petrol, on interest rates, on industrial relations and on tax—each pathetic scare campaign more ridiculous than the one before. The scare campaign on petrol couldn't last from Monday to Wednesday when it was pointed out to him that petrol prices have skyrocketed 24 per cent over the last year on his watch. Petrol prices have gone up for the average family in an average car $900 over the last year at the same time as real wages have gone backwards $700. So then he moved to a scare campaign about interest rates, and that collapsed under the weight of the Reserve Bank Governor's commentary about interest rates. He said don't expect an interest rate next year. He didn't say under one government or another. He made it very clear that the Prime Minister was, once again, making it up for political purposes. And he was reminded that the last time that those opposite ran a dishonest scare campaign about interest rates, when they got through that election, interest rates went up six consecutive times under the Liberals and Nationals immediately after making those ridiculous claims.

By Saturday, the scare campaign on petrol had fallen over. The wheels had come off the scare campaign on interests rates by Saturday. It was the old industrial relations scare, wasn't it? And it was about unions. Unions have got a legitimate role to play as the voice of working people in our workplaces, and the truth is that the union movement and the employer groups have raised issues about enterprise bargaining, and those views should be taken seriously. So that scare campaign only lasted a day or so, and then we got this ridiculous scare campaign on tax, which has collapsed under the weight of the knowledge that this is the second highest taxing government in the last 30 years, and the highest taxing government was John Howard's. The two highest taxing governments in recent history of both been Liberal and National governments.

We'll see more of this in the lead-up to the campaign as the Prime Minister tries to distract from his failures on the economy and his lack of a plan for the future. He gets no help from the hapless and hopeless Treasurer, who lurches from one preselection humiliation to another, like he did on the weekend. We've got a Prime Minister you can't trust and a Treasurer who can't count. What could go wrong! On the numbers alone, this Treasurer is the worst performing in memory on wages, on growth, on business investment. He's got two million Australians either underemployed or unemployed at the same time as he's got rampant skills and labour shortages in the economy.

The past two years of this pandemic do not excuse eight long years of economic mismanagement. He says it is all about COVID and he says it's happening to everyone around the world. Consider these facts: in the OECD, we've gone from eighth in the world when it comes to average economic growth under the last Labor government to now 17th. We were ninth on unemployment under the last Labor government and now we're 15th. We were sixth in the OECD when it came to wages and now we're 21st in the OECD. Under this government, we've dropped nine places on growth, six places on unemployment and 15 places on wages—all of this despite $1 trillion in debt, because we have this budget which is absolutely riddled with rorts and weighed down with waste.

We've got the subs debacle, the robodebt debacle, the sports rorts and land rorts and regional rorts—the list goes on and on, yet we have this dishonesty and desperation from a Prime Minister desperate to distract from his own failures. That means, I think, that, of all the lies that have been told about the economy, the biggest lie is that those opposite have done a good job managing that economy. The defining example of this is the JobKeeper debacle. JobKeeper was a great idea. Frydenberg, the butterfingers of Australian politics, got his hands on it and he turned a good program into a program that wasted tens of billions of dollars, and that's why the Financial Review wrote an article headlined 'Frydenberg fires JobKeeper missile at himself'. If you look at that piece in the Financial Review, I think the key conclusion is that they describe the current Treasurer as 'lighter than helium'. Those in this chamber know that helium is colourless. They know it's inert. They know it's lightweight. And this Treasurer is the helium man of Australian politics. Helium balloons are shiny and superficial, and when they become untethered and untied, as he has, they lose touch with what's happening on the ground. They end up washed up on a beach inconveniencing the seagulls, and that's the type of career trajectory that we're seeing from the current Treasurer. One of the member for Kooyong's predecessors was described from the dispatch box as a 'souffle that wouldn't rise twice'. This Treasurer could only dream of being nicknamed something as substantial as a souffle! He is more like the little can of whipped cream that goes on the top; it makes a lot of noise and there is a lot of fizzle, but, give it 10 seconds, and it's melted away—that's the helium man of Australian politics.

Under this Treasurer and under this government, rorts and waste have gone from an embarrassing aberration to a shameful norm. Wasting money is not a bug in this government; it is a feature of this government. No wonder they don't want an anticorruption commission. Former generations of the Liberal Party described themselves as born to rule. This generation of Liberals were born to rort. But you cannot rort and lie and spin your way to the economic recovery that this country desperately needs. Those opposite have learnt absolutely nothing from what Australians have done to get through the worst of this pandemic. They cannot understand that Australians got through this together, and we will only succeed together in the recovery by working together, not dividing and diminishing each other, not playing footsie with extreme elements making violent threats, and not playing politics with people's lives and with the economy that working people rely on. They don't understand that this recovery in the economy is Australia's big chance and we have to take it. They don't understand that this is our chance to build an economy and a society that is stronger after COVID-19 than it was before COVID-19.

This is our big chance, and the country has a big choice to make. We don't know when the election will be, but we do know what it will be about. It will be about whether we can be stronger together after COVID than we were before. It will be whether or not we can genuinely unite the country behind our goals, whether they be in the economy or in the society. We can't afford another wasted decade of missed opportunities that has seen jobs and investment go begging and working families left behind. We can't afford another three years like the last eight years, with all of the wage stagnation and job insecurity and all of the rest of it—all of the attacks on wages, all of the attacks on working people and working families and Medicare, all of the attacks that have been so characteristic of those opposite. There are the sneaky cuts that are in the paper today that they won't tell us about before the election, but they will be laying in wait for the Australian people after the election. We can't afford another three years like the last eight. Working families in this country cannot risk another three years of the blundering and bullying bulldust that we hear from this Prime Minister in question time. We can be stronger after COVID than before, but not under those opposite.

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