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

As the leader of the Labor Party indicated in the House and as Labor speakers this evening have indicated, Labor will be supporting the Coronavirus Economic Response Package Omnibus Bill 2020 and related bills. We're supporting it because it is so urgent, but it doesn't mean that we don't have deep concerns about the framing of the legislation and the capacity of the legislation to do what it is supposed to do.

I want to make a couple of remarks this evening to foreshadow an amendment circulated in my name in relation to the employment aspects of the legislation. I want to be frank about some of those issues here this evening. I think we have a responsibility in this place to fight for every job in the Australian economy. We are here for one day together, probably, but nurses, doctors, schoolteachers, supermarket workers, aged-care workers and Centrelink workers will turn up day after day after day to do their jobs. It's appropriate that we're here for one day, but we should be honouring those workers and we should be making sure that we fight for every job in the Australian economy.

The risk of mass unemployment is here, and it's real. Generational unemployment is a social cancer. It eats away at families, it eliminates hope and aspiration for a better life and it corrodes social cohesion. I fear that those on the government side are a little bit too glib about the impact of unemployment and have run up the white flag, conceding that mass unemployment is inevitable. It is not. This government is paralysed by its own sterile ideology, its obsession with small government and trickle-down economics, so that they are dismissive of the power of government to act in the interests of everybody in a market economy. They are too sceptical about the capacity of the state and state action in a crisis. Mass unemployment is not inevitable. I notice that the Treasurer was on his feet conceding very large numbers in terms of the Australian economy today.

Other countries are acting decisively and urgently now to protect jobs and businesses to ensure that they maintain employment and productive capacity for the other side of the crisis. The British government of Boris Johnson—Senator McGrath's old boss—will subsidise firms who keep workers employed to the tune of 80 per cent of their wage bill in order to ensure that furloughed workers remain on the payroll. This plan will initially last for three months, and there is no cap. The Danish government is planning to spend 13 per cent of the nation's GDP subsidising private-sector workers to avoid mass lay-offs. The Danish plan is to essentially freeze the economy for the length of the outbreak so that it can be revitalised quickly when it is over. The New Zealand government is providing immediate wage subsidies of NZ$585 every week for every full-time worker, up to 12 weeks.

Australian governments are entirely capable of decisive action. Kevin Rudd and his government didn't accept the inevitability of mass unemployment either. All but Australia fell victim to corporate collapses and generational job losses in the GFC. Rudd acted with urgency, scale and ambition. Hundreds of thousands of Australians have good jobs today because Kevin Rudd and that government acted decisively then. Of course, it has been pilloried in a dishonest, partisan and corrosive campaign by those opposite ever since. They turned up and voted 34 times against the GFC stimulus package. Contrast that with how Labor comes to the parliament in this time of crisis: constructively, with a sense of urgency and in the national interest.

This package looks anaemic alongside the determination of other governments today and the Rudd government 10 years ago. This package is better at supporting people who lose a job than it is at keeping them in a job in the first place. The value of the withholding tax arrangements is only around 20 per cent for a worker on average weekly ordinary-time earnings. It is nowhere near enough, and business can cash it in and lay off workers. It is unconditional, and that is unacceptable. The package should seek to protect jobs now, not to temporarily soften the blow of unemployment. Firms that receive assistance should be required to maintain workers in their jobs. That's in the interests of the firms themselves, it is in the interests of workers and it is in the national interest. That's what the UK, New Zealand and European economies are doing, and they will be in much better shape after the economic crisis has passed.

Assistance to airlines and other major businesses must involve commitments to maintain capability and employment and an honest consideration of equity stakes rather than untied grants that can be sold again when profitability returns. That is in the interests of taxpayers. Two-thirds of the $189 billion announced by the government is for measures to support credit flows and business lending, even though there was an effort to claim the whole $189 billion as a stimulus. The actual injections of government spending across both stimulus packages amount to only three per cent of GDP, a much smaller figure than for comparable nations. The Morrison government has brought a fiscal knife to an economic gunfight.

The decision to make low-income workers raid their retirement savings rather than the government stepping in to support them stinks. Telling recently unemployed people to raid their own super at the bottom of the market instead of offering substantial wage subsidies is an abrogation of the responsibility of government. It will shift the burden of paying for this crisis onto those who can least afford it. I suspect that the government couldn't help itself. Forcing super funds to liquidate assets at the bottom of the market rather than what they should be doing in the interests of their members—that is, buying assets—is just vandalism.

The package is deeply flawed. It runs up the white flag on jobs, it lacks ambition and it is nowhere near the scale of the response that this crisis demands. The amendment in my name at least holds out the prospect of challenging the government to look up, assess the scale of the challenge, deliver job security for Australian workers and make sure that Australian firms have the workers and the capacity that they need to produce and compete on the other side of this grave economic and health crisis.