Patrick Gorman (Perth, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise tonight to speak about what a strong economy looks like and where the government is choosing to take us instead. This is the year that we set up the economy for the future. While we tackle the immediate economic challenges, the parliament should also look at opportunities for national investment. We owe it to future generations to think not just about our interests today but about the way we grow the Australian economy well into the future. A strong economy gives people hope, it gives people a place to call home, it gives us an education system that ensures everyone reaches their full potential, and it gives people a future.

The purpose of Labor when it comes to the economy is to start with the basics: a home, an education, a job and a fairer deal for the next generation. Labor is the party of the future, the standard-of-living party. The Liberal Party just wants to let the free market rip. The Greens party believes that you must always choose the environment over people if you are to be truly pure. And One Nation, Palmer and the radical right are parties that divide, and we've seen that division clearly in terms of Mr Palmer's political intervention in Western Australia, with his attempts to tear down the WA border.

The Australian economy right now is deeply troubled. The challenges of 2020 will dominate the work in this place over the next decade. We are facing confirmation tomorrow that we are in our first recession in 30 years. More than one million Australians are unemployed. For the first time ever we have reached one million Australians unemployed. The government's own figures tell us that some 400,000 more workers will lose their jobs before Christmas. At the same time this government has no plan for jobs. We hear far too much criticism and far too much promising, but we don't actually see a clearly articulated plan to bring back jobs, to create new jobs or to give long-term certainty for the jobs that are in our economy. We just see plans to cut super, increase university fees and wind back JobKeeper.

A strong economy means that we have a healthy superannuation system. Superannuation is a strength of the Australian economy. The Leader of the Opposition said:

At a time of global uncertainty and disruption, having a strong domestic savings pool is a clear measure of national resilience. It is the ballast our financial system and economy needs.

It provides the capital to invest in needed infrastructure and nation building.

I couldn't agree more. Fifteen million Australians are members of our superannuation system. Some 80 per cent of Australians aged 25 to 54 hold a superannuation account. Collectively that system manages $2.8 trillion in assets. That's more than 140 per cent of Australia's national gross domestic product. Let's hope that that gets a lot bigger. The current average balance in retirement for an Australian man is $270,000. Sadly, for women it is just $157,000. This is a gap that we must address. As long as that gap exists we know that we have not achieved true gender equality in this country.

One way we can help men and women is to stick with the 12 per cent superannuation guarantee increase. That's something that has been talked about in this place for a decade. People have made decisions about the future of their lives based on that guarantee. The Prime Minister, both as Prime Minister and as Treasurer, said that he is fully committed to that guarantee. If we stick with that 12 per cent increase, the median balance at retirement will be $300,000 for women and more than $600,000 for men. It is good for both, but I still find it very hard to accept those huge gaps between the gendered outcomes in superannuation. Even the lowest-paid Australians will be 15 to 20 per cent better off if we stick with the 12 per cent guarantee. We know that, if we don't, things will get worse, particularly for women. At the moment, 40 per cent of older single women retire in poverty. That is something that isn't necessary and isn't acceptable in Australia in 2020. We definitely shouldn't be setting up a system to fail in the future.

Let's look at the sorts of jobs that pay for that superannuation—the sorts of jobs that give people that opportunity to give their kids a fairer deal, that pass on a fairer deal to the next generation. A huge amount of jobs created in Australia recently have been in the care economy. When you start to scratch the surface of the care economy, you see that it is a place where the jobs are not as secure as they should be. We've seen that in aged care, with people having to work at two or three facilities because they can't get the hours or the security of employment that they need and deserve.

The other side of that is that we could create even more jobs if this government had a jobs plan in the space of home care. Tonight there are 103,000 Australians waiting for home-care packages. They are waiting up to three years. Some of them never get the package; they only wait for it. So we need a plan for aged care in the middle of this crisis. As I said, the government don't have a plan for jobs. Sadly, they do not have a plan for aged care. But it's okay. Labor is going to come to the rescue.

The Labor Party does have a plan when it comes to aged care. There are some really simple things that the government could steal from us today—firstly, that there be minimum staffing levels in residential aged care. Anyone who has interacted with the system knows that is an essential thing for fixing the system long term. Secondly, reduce the homecare package waiting list, so people can stay in their home for longer. I think we would all like that. Most Australians would like to stay in their home as long as possible. Thirdly, ensure transparency and accountability of funding, so we know where it is going and we know if that funding is not working.

How about some independent measurement and public reporting, as recommended by the government's own royal commission? This is a radical idea, but maybe we could make sure that every aged-care facility in Australia has adequate personnel protective equipment. I can't believe that, six months into this pandemic, we are still talking about providing the basics for our aged-care sector. There could also be better training for staff; a surge workforce strategy; and additional resources so that the aged-care royal commission can do its job fully and properly.

At the other end of the economy, at the other end of life, is child care. Research released by the Mackell Institute just last week showed that there has been a 7.1 per cent decline in the number of women in jobs since March 2020. I commend the work of Ryan Batchelor and Sam Crosby in continuing to keep this on the agenda and continuing research into this space. Their recent report, The Impact of COVID-19 on Women and Work in Victoria, found that emergency economic policies initially helped women stay afloat. However, the report notes:

… a mix of poor policy design (the early access to superannuation program), and ill-considered decisions (cessation of free childcare and ending JobKeeper in early childhood centres; proposed HECS increases) have not been supportive of many women across our community.

A national survey from The Parenthood found that a third of parents, 32 per cent, surveyed would need to reduce or remove their children altogether as we return to the normal full-fee-paying days of pre-COVID levels of child-care fees. There is a huge economic opportunity in this space. Again, more jobs could be created and hence more opportunity for people to go back to work. What we saw from the report of the Grattan Institute was that, if we put an extra $5 billion a year into the early childhood education and care sector, the payoff would be an $11 billion increase in GDP and, for the average Australian working mum, $150,000 more earning over their lifetime.

There is a lot for us to work with when it comes to delivering a stronger economy. There are so many things that this government has refused to take any steps on. We have so much more strength in Australia. We have so much to work with—location, location, location. We are here in the Indo-Pacific. We are in the best place you could possibly want to be for a naturally resource-rich, sun-rich, wind-rich place like us. We have strong unions and strong businesses, and they can work together to achieve outcomes for working Australians. We have the space to do practically anything and, despite this government's knowledge tax and their attack on the university sector more generally, in Australia we do have one of the most skilled workforces. We have a great resource sector, a strong tourism sector, a great infrastructure sector and a great education sector. What that means for 25 million Australians is that we owe it to them to make sure they can have a home, a job and a fairer deal for the next generation.