Sue Lines (WA, Deputy-President) Share this | Hansard source

Today in question time we heard that the government is seemingly in a parallel universe when it comes to the question of whether the economy is working for ordinary Australians. In response to a survey, we have found that ordinary Australians, working Australians, pensioners—a whole range of Australians, voting for different political parties in this country—overwhelmingly believe that there is economic inequality and that it is increasing. That is what they are saying, and they know that because they feel it in their pay packets, they feel it in increased charges and they feel it because they see a government that favours the big end of town over their interests.

If we need further proof of this, recently we saw the Governor of the Reserve Bank, Dr Lowe, come out very strongly and say that wealth inequality has become more pronounced, particularly in the last five to six years. He went on to say that workers are currently experiencing lower rises in their pay packets than they experienced during the last recession. That was almost 30 years ago. This is coming from the conservative elements of our society—the Governor of the Reserve Bank, who does not normally make these sorts of statements, but he is making them because that is the reality. We know that Australians are earning less. It is an appalling state of affairs when workers today are seeing lower wage increases than they saw 30 years ago. Wage growth has slipped to a record low of 1.9 per cent. I heard Labor members saying today that our wage-fixing system, enterprise bargaining and so on, is broken. It clearly needs to be looked at, when workers are not getting a fair share for the hard work that they are putting in.

We also know that household debt is high and is rising faster than the unusually slow growth in incomes. No wonder ordinary working Australians are concerned about the economy, when they see that their household debt is rising yet they are not being compensated in their pay packets for the hard work that they do. Sadly, that fell on deaf ears today in the government. The federal Treasurer recently even claimed that inequality has got better. I do not know what statistics or reviews the Treasurer is looking at, but nobody—from the Reserve Bank governor to well-established experts—is telling us that the incidence of inequality is falling; everyone is telling us it is rising. The experts are saying the opposite to what the Treasurer says. We recently had David Hetherington from Per Capita tell us that the labour share of income in the economy has fallen. Workers know that because there is less in their pay packets, but we now have a statistician telling us that. Inequality expert Peter Whiteford has directly contradicted the Treasurer, Mr Morrison, stating that household income inequality has become much more unequal. Meanwhile, we know that the top one per cent have almost doubled their share of the national income.

Sadly, we hear members of the government saying, 'It's just the politics of envy', but this has nothing to do with the silly notion of the politics of envy. This is ordinary working Australians—Liberal and Labor voters, voters of all political persuasions—who are saying overwhelmingly that things in their households are getting tough, and that's backed up by the experts. Unfortunately, the Turnbull government have just not looked at that. In fact, we have seen that they have rewarded those top-income earners with tax cuts and they have hit the pay packets of low-income earners in standing by earlier this year and doing absolutely nothing when penalty rates were cut. They've also cut Medicare, making it harder for ordinary Australians to go to the doctor. We've also seen cuts to education and we've seen, more broadly, cuts to health. So Australians are quite correct when they say the economy is not working in their interests. They're making the contribution but they're not getting the rewards. Inequality will continue to rise.