Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I won't reflect on that last contribution too much, except to say that it's a strange obsession with Mr Swan that Senator Bragg has. I'm not sure what a chief comptroller is; I'm sure it's not something good. It's probably something that lives large in Senator Bragg's imagination. But really it's symbolic of a lack of a depth of understanding of the problem and a lack of a capacity to engage with one's responsibility as a backbench member of a government that's struggling to find an agenda that we're down to the bottom rung of university debating style attacks, and we should all try and do a bit better than that—as the emerging of Jacob Rees-Mogg of the Australian Senate.

The first step towards solving a problem is recognising that you have one. You have to be honest about it. You have to think about what has caused it. You have to consider what's likely to fix it. You have to think about what you can do and what you can contribute. Don't blame others. Don't blame the Labor Party after six years of government. Have a go at making it better. We're told that, 'If you have a go, you'll get a go'. Perhaps the Prime Minister and Senator Cormann should have a go at having a go. It would be a start.

Economic slowdown denialism is a bit like climate change denialism; the longer you allow it to persist, the higher the cost of inaction and the more likely it is that grave consequences ensue. So, is there a problem? Well, we should have a look at the evidence. On wages, we've got the lowest growth on record. The Wisden records of Australian wages contain no period where wages have grown by such small amounts. Beyond the slow growth in wages, the wage profit share is declining. Company profits are increasing at a much higher rate than wages are increasing. The promise of trickle-down economics has not been manifest for all Australian workers.

In terms of productivity, growth is at very low levels. The last wave of successful productivity reform really was in the Hawke-Keating period. It was based upon cooperation with the trade union movement, Senator Bragg, something that you would find hard to imagine, I know. It was based on cooperation between the institutions that represent workers and employers, and the stakeholders in the Australian economy. It was based on an enterprise bargaining system that worked, and that was based upon a fair process and cooperative principles. Not much, really, has happened since then in terms of productivity in Australian workplaces.

The government, in terms of productivity, only has one plan: enhanced management prerogative, more power for employers. We've got jobs—job creation in the economy—not good jobs, but people working two, three or four jobs to sustain a family. There have been two responses from the government really: firstly, 'It's not real,' and, secondly, 'Look over there.'

Senator Cormann today in question time—there is no possibility that this bloke will admit any problem; there is no index alternative to the recognised ones that he won't cite to quibble with the obvious. Today, it was some marginal shift in the Gini coefficient when he was asked about lower wages. I mean, really—the Gini coefficient? These characters haven't cared about inequality in the Australian economy in their lives. The next approach is to cite global headwinds. For a bloke from Western Australia, he's a guy who loves a yachting analogy more than is healthy, I think. The second approach is to say, 'Look over there,' and try to distract Australian voters with increasingly cruel approaches to people on welfare—drug testing older people on Newstart, drug testing people who really need a fair go. I think that the Australian community can do much better than the approach that has been offered by the government.