Patrick Gorman (Perth, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Western Australia) Share this | Hansard source

The Liberal Party claims to be the party of sensible economic management, but what we know is that that's just another broken promise from a very broken government. I remember being incredibly worried about the $40 billion of debt that the WA Liberal Party left the people of Western Australia. The member for Pearce was the Western Australian Treasurer for the duration of the Barnett government. It was a lot of money, $40 billion; it was a huge debt. It's still being paid off. But then the Prime Minister came along and said, 'Hold my beer!' and gave us $1 trillion of debt. Their only plan to pay it back—you can't go and sit in that chair, member for Mackellar; I can't have a go at you then—is a certain member's plan for an inheritance tax. To pay back this thousand billion dollars of Liberal debt, there's a certain member of this place who is running around knocking on the door of the Treasurer, knocking on the door of the Prime Minister and saying, 'Let's have an inheritance tax.' That's the only fresh idea the Liberal Party have.

I hope that their plan for an inheritance tax goes the same way as their plan for the 'back in black' budget that they actually couldn't deliver us, but we do know, when it comes to taxes, that this Prime Minister loves a good tax. It was this Prime Minister, when he was Treasurer, who suggested that we should have the GST increased. He came out and said it was a proposition worth considering. Someone talked him out of it, but I know that idea hasn't gone. They love taxes so much that the Treasurer collected $150 billion more in tax this year than was collected in the last year that Labor was in government. In fact, the two highest taxing governments in the last 30 years have been those led by John Howard and by the current Prime Minister.

I do feel a little bit for Peter Costello. The second-rate Liberals ride on his coat-tails. The Treasurer and the Prime Minister never served a day in government with Peter Costello, yet they ride on his political legacy. At the same time, we know that Australians are paying $4,500 more in tax, per Australian, than they did under Labor in 2013. On top of people having stagnant wages and insecure work, they are paying these very high taxes to fund the Liberal Party's slush funds. This government cannot take any credit for what it claims is economic recovery unless it also takes responsibility for the crises that are happening across this country.

There's a crisis in aged care: in this calendar year alone, we've had some 700 Australians in aged care die of COVID. We do not have enough rapid antigen tests to provide for those who need them. People have been left driving around, from chemist to chemist, week after week. We still don't have a plan for getting the Australian Defence Force over to Western Australia as we start to see an outbreak of COVID in aged-care homes there.

It all starts to feel like this government just does not have a plan. Its only plans are the lived reality of Australians: wages going backwards; people looking for secure, well-paid jobs and being unable to find them; and people paying huge amounts for child care—35 per cent more than when this government first came to office. But there's always someone they can blame. They can blame the cost of beef on the situation in Ukraine. They can blame on the states the fact that they didn't order enough vaccine doses.

We know that people are worried about their lived reality under this government. Look at those who represent aged-care workers in Western Australia. A very well-respected community leader, Carolyn Smith, said:

We only have to look over east to see what COVID has done in aged care facilities.

I think many aged care workers, many residents, many families, are going to be concerned.

Western Australians are hugely concerned about the next few months, and we can't afford to repeat the Prime Minister's mistakes yet again. Western Australia needs a partner in Canberra, not the sort of government that bashes us up, year after year, and then, only at election time, all of a sudden the Prime Minister wants to be Western Australia's best friend—to the absolute disappointment, I should say, of many of the government's backbenchers, who complained about WA's health measures for years and years. We need a government that is actually going to learn the lessons of COVID and invest in our people. That means fixing the holes in our economy, making sure we're a country that makes things again; making sure that we dive into the talents of the Australian people so we again buy Australian. Buying Australian doesn't just mean buying from Liberal Party donors; buying Australian means buying from the hardworking small and medium-sized enterprises across this country, giving them access to the $190 billion of government contracts that are signed every year. As we say, Australian taxpayer dollars should be able to go to Kalgoorlie, not Korea, whenever possible.

Labor has a clear plan on how we start to shift the tide on buying Australian. We'll establish a future made-in-Australia office. We'll assist Australian businesses to bid for those major infrastructure projects that have billions of dollars of federal government money attached to them. We'll make it easier for small and medium-sized businesses to secure government contracts, and we'll make sure that businesses that get government contracts look after their workforce. We need to support First Nations businesses so we can maximise the skill transfer and opportunities for those businesses to grow even more. We need to make sure the businesses that are contracting with the Australian government are paying tax in Australia. It would be a much better idea to get companies that operate here to pay tax here, rather than go with these crazy ideas from government backbenchers to have an inheritance tax. We should also support Australian industry—

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