Susan Templeman (Macquarie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Back in 2019 I sat on that side of the chamber, and I remember speaking to a deaf government about the challenges that families were facing around stagnant wage growth and the rising cost of living, and that was just completely dismissed by the people who were in charge of the economy back then. Having now been on this side of the chamber for three years and having listened to those opposite from a different perspective, I can see why. It's because they do not have a single policy that would tackle the challenges that people face. They can whine and they can moan and they can stir people up. We know that people have been hurting. We know what the consequences have been. That's why we put forward sensible, thoughtful measures—not to fix everything instantly, because none of it has a quick fix, but to address and ease the pain that people are feeling. Unfortunately, nothing we've heard from anybody opposite offers any alternative approach—how they might tackle the economic issues that we face.

In every budget we've handed down, we've been focused on helping with the cost of living, using the levers that we have. But we've also been very mindful that we inherited a big Liberal debt and that that needed to be paid down. We found savings in the budget, savings that those opposite were incapable of finding when they were in government. There were no savings in their budgets. They never delivered a surplus. As we found those savings, we used them to pay down debt that we inherited. We did that because we knew that we needed to provide a secure foundation for Australia to find its way in what we now know is an ever-changing world and a challenging world.

Let's think about where we are now compared to where we were. When we came to government, inflation was shooting up like a rocket. It was going up and up and up. People weren't yet feeling those price increases because they take a little time to work their way through, but it wasn't long before people realised that those price increases equalled pain. We have done a total reverse on that. Not only is inflation not going up now; it's actually on its way down, and it's within a range that clearly gives the Reserve Bank confidence that it's okay to ease interest rates. That's a pretty significant thing to have achieved. We've achieved that without something that normally happens and that other countries have resorted to, and that is high unemployment. Over the last few years, together, Australians have achieved something quite remarkable—and that is that we have made substantial progress on inflation, we've got wages growing again for the first time in memory, we've got low unemployment and we've seen the creation of more than a million jobs under the Albanese Labor government. As of last week, unemployment continues to be low; it sits at around 4.1 per cent, with record participation and widespread job creation. Four out of five jobs are in the private sector. Those are jobs that businesses are having the confidence to create. That doesn't happen without a steady hand at the wheel steering the economy of Australia.

One of the things I think that those in opposition fail to appreciate—and some of them might be too young to remember, and I'll forgive them for that—is that the consequences of high unemployment are not just numbers. This is not a piece of data that looks bad on a piece of paper. It's what that does to people and people's lives. It really, seriously impacts someone's self-esteem and their mental health, let alone their finances and their financial future. It impacts their relationships. It impacts our wider society as people choose to withdraw from things. It has such far-reaching consequences, and I know because I saw this in the nineties. That is not something that Labor believes should be repeated. Everything we have done, as best we could, has been with a view on minimising that impact of unemployment and ensuring that people still have jobs. I am so proud that Australian businesses rose to that and that we've got this economy where it is now.

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