Katy Gallagher (ACT, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Finance) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Finance (Senator Cormann) to a question without notice asked by Senator Wong today relating to the economy.

Today we had the National Accounts released. What they've shown is that we have the deepest recession since the Great Depression, we've got the worst quarterly contraction since records began 60 years ago, household spending has collapsed, business investment—already in decline since 2018—has tanked, one million Australians are unemployed, 400,000 people are expected to lose their jobs by Christmas, 1.6 million Australians are receiving income support through JobSeeker or youth allowance, about 3½ million Australian workers are on JobKeeper and we have record levels of debt and will have deficits for a decade. What's this government's response to this disastrous set of numbers released today—numbers which tell the distressing stories of businesses lost, jobs lost and households under enormous stress? Where is the government's plan for economic recovery? Where is their plan for jobs? We've known for some time that the Treasurer is very quick to go out and tell everyone how bad the economy is and how terrible the impact of COVID-19 has been, but he's not as quick to get out and tell us what the plan is for recovery, and that's what people want to hear.

People know the economy has suffered. They know jobs have been lost. Each one of us knows someone who's lost their job and who's struggled to make ends meet. We all understand that. The more relevant thing for the government to be focusing on is what they are doing. The only thing they've been clear about since July when they provided the economic update is a plan to cut economic support—to cut JobKeeper, to cut JobSeeker, to cut wages, to cut super and to freeze the pension. They're all decisions that this government has taken. We know what they're prepared to cut and what they're prepared to withdraw; what's less clear to us is what they're going to do to drive economic growth, to drive jobs growth and to support businesses that are under pressure in the recovery stage. That's what we are looking for, that's why we asked our questions today, and that's why we want to know whether this is the right time for the government to be withdrawing the support that's been provided in the last six months.

It's not just Labor that want to know this; the Reserve Bank governor has made it clear on many occasions that fiscal policy will remain an extremely important element of any economic recovery, and he has warned against withdrawing fiscal support too soon, because the consequences of that will be a longer and deeper recession. And the unemployment queues will grow longer than they should or need to if the government gets this wrong. That's the point that Labor is making. That's why we are asking the government: what is your plan for jobs? How are you going to grow jobs and grow the economy? That is what Australians expect of their government. That's what they elect them to do—not to tell them how bad everything is, how it's not their fault, how it's everyone else's fault, the states' fault, and how we're better than every other country. When you do those international comparisons, I think it's pretty cold comfort, frankly, for the million people who have joined the unemployment queue or the 1.6 million surviving fortnight to fortnight on JobSeeker or youth allowance. I don't think they make the international comparison. They want to know what the plan is for jobs.

We know this government puts a lot of emphasis on the spin. There's a lot less emphasis placed on the substance. So we have announcement after announcement—JobMaker, JobTrainer and HomeBuilder. Then when you drill down into those programs that were announced 10 weeks ago, three months ago, what do you find out? You find out that there's no idea how many jobs will be created under JobMaker. The employment department didn't know, other than that they weren't in charge of it. On JobTrainer, we don't know the skills priority list. I think they may have released something today, but when it was announced 10 weeks ago they didn't know. They had to wait for that work to be done. And HomeBuilder was supposed to drive the construction industry—nothing spent and no applications approved. We want more than spin. We want substance and we want a jobs plans from this government. (Time expired)