Gary Humphries (ACT, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am very happy, as one of the ‘lackeys’ to whom Senator Hutchins referred, to rise in this debate and make some points. Let me say very categorically at the outset that this government does not deny and has never denied that there is poverty in Australia, that the extent of poverty in Australia remains unacceptable and that as a community we have an obligation to identify and to assist those Australians who have not shared in the benefits that a lucky country has brought to so many people. Inequality, in a sense, is inevitable in a free society, where people are free to make choices and to reap the benefits of their initiative and labour. But it is equally important that society set limits on the extent of inequality, to the extent that those who are seriously unable to provide for the essential basics of life should be provided for and assisted to ensure that they enjoy that essential standard of living that Australians would regard as everyone’s entitlement.

The Senate Community Affairs References Committee agreed on the fact that poverty in Australia demanded further action. It disagreed on many other aspects of this particular debate. It disagreed on whether poverty was becoming more serious or less serious. It disagreed on the measures that might be taken to address poverty in Australia. It was the government’s view, in presenting to this committee, and it was the view as well of the minority members of this report of this committee, that the most important way that any government can address poverty in a nation like Australia is to act to lift the general economic standards and economic performance of the country so as to create the wealth that will benefit those Australians not yet experiencing the phenomenon of greater national wealth and productivity.

We felt that by ensuring that the workforce continued to grow there was a greater likelihood that a person leaving school and going into the workforce would have a job there. We felt that was the most important way of tackling poverty in this country. We felt that freeing up the labour market so that businesses, particularly small businesses, were not discouraged and inhibited from taking on new staff was a substantive and clear benefit for those who sought to enter the workforce and who could not previously do so. We wanted to make sure that economic growth was nationwide and occurred in regions as well as in cities, in all states and territories of the country. We wanted to broaden the economic miracle that Australia has enjoyed in the last decade, to make sure that as many Australians as possible could benefit from that.

But consistently throughout this debate those who took part on the majority side in the committee failed to make that acknowledgment. They persisted in seeing the glass as half-full when a better analogy may have been that the glass was in fact three-quarters full and there was benefit in the approach the government had taken in generating employment, in creating jobs and in lifting real wages. Members should consult the figures that were relied on for that in the minority report. That was the evidence that was in front of us but that was the evidence that was consistently ignored by the majority in this inquiry. It is to the majority’s discredit that they continued to see this inquiry as an opportunity to bag out the Howard coalition government. That is what so much of this inquiry was about; that is what so many days of evidence were all about. How can we give this government a hard time over its performance in this area?

How little time was spent acknowledging progress that had been made. How little credit was given to the government for having created jobs, for having reduced unemployment to five per cent, for having lifted real wages of Australians over the last eight or nine years by something in the order of 14 per cent when in the previous 13 years of Labor government the net increase was in the order of about 1.5 per cent. None of that received any lip service in this inquiry at all.

There were witnesses before the inquiry—not the Bolsheviks that Senator Hutchins referred to, although there were witnesses certainly who persisted in that line as well—who wanted to make this inquiry about why the government was wrong, wrong, wrong.