Murray Watt (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Northern Australia) Share this | Hansard source

I will be speaking in support of the Economic Recovery Package (JobMaker Hiring Credit) Amendment Bill 2020, and Labor certainly support this bill. But, as you will see from my contribution, there are a number of concerns that Labor have in relation to this bill and we certainly would encourage the government to fix up those concerns. One of the reasons why we support this bill is that Labor have repeatedly called on this government to expand the support it is providing to Australians who have been hit by the COVID recession. Sadly, this bill is a continuation of the government's approach, which is to actually withdraw support, contain support or narrow support, even though the economic situation for so many Australians is still so precarious.

If we go back to the very beginning, when COVID first hit this country and businesses started to be closed down, it was Labor who were calling for wage subsidies to be paid. Of course the Prime Minister and his allies have tried to reinvent history to argue that the JobKeeper wage subsidy was all their own doing and invention. But any fair-minded observer of the history of these measures will see that, for quite some time, Labor were calling for a wage subsidy to be introduced and that it really wasn't until the British conservative government decided to introduce a wage subsidy themselves that we finally saw some change from this government. So we were calling for those wage subsidies to be paid, as a constructive suggestion to this government, to try to avoid the sorts of unemployment queues that we saw outside Centrelink offices so soon after lockdowns were announced.

Our suggestions in relation to this bill are made in that same constructive spirit. Unfortunately, the government have previously ignored a range of suggestions that we've made to improve JobKeeper. They have continued to exclude well over a million casual workers, temporary migrant workers, arts workers, entertainment workers and council workers from receiving JobKeeper. That has unnecessarily cost many, many jobs around our country. Many employers—whether they be councils or in the arts, entertainment, hospitality or others—really were left with no option other than to lay off staff when they actually would have preferred to keep their staff on through payments of JobKeeper. But the government removed that choice and consigned well over a million people to unnecessary unemployment.

The really fundamental point that Labor have been trying to make over and over again, both in this chamber and outside, is that we know there is a recession underway and we know that it is the deepest, worst recession that our country has seen since the Great Depression nearly 100 years ago, yet this government has actively made choices to impose more pain on Australians through its decisions around the JobKeeper payments and now the hiring credit scheme as well. The government has continually made decisions to exclude certain categories of worker and certain types of business from some of the income support that is being paid. It means that, at a time when we should be seeing government step up to the plate, stimulate the economy and keep money flowing through people's pockets so that they can spend it in businesses and create further employment, the government are doing exactly the opposite. They're removing those payments. They're reigning in people's ability to spend, extending the recession and making things worse. It's exactly the wrong way to be going. As I say, they're doing it again here with the JobMaker hiring credit.

We know that there are many Australians quite rightly very worried about their jobs right now. There are, of course, the hundreds of thousands of people who have lost their jobs following the lockdowns and the COVID recession, and there are at least as many people who have maintained their employment for now but are very worried about how long that employment will remain in place. It's no wonder that people are so worried, when you look at some of the data that is coming through the Bureau of Statistics about what's actually happening right now in the Australian economy. The most recent ABS figures showed a fall in jobs and wages in every state and territory in the first full fortnight after the Morrison government cut JobKeeper prematurely. As I've said, the decisions this government has made and is making right now are actually making things worse. They're actually leading to people losing jobs. They're actually leading to the recession becoming deeper and longer than it needs to be. What we should be seeing from this government is every possible effort being put into bringing the country out of recession as quickly as possible and getting unemployment down as quickly as possible.

The ABS figures show that in the very first full fortnight after the government cut its JobKeeper payments we saw a fall in jobs and wages in every state and territory. It doesn't actually give me much pleasure to say that we told the government so, but we did. We tried to get the government to change course. We were out there repeatedly saying that it was too early to be cutting back on JobKeeper and it would cost jobs. The government said, 'No, no, it'll be fine; we've got to get people off these payments at some point.' And what do you know? Exactly what we predicted would happen has happened—jobs and wages are falling in every state and territory around Australia. Thirty thousand jobs were lost in Australia in the fortnight to 17 October, which means that, overall, 470,000 jobs in Australia have been lost since the COVID outbreak began, and 160,000 more Australians are expected to join the unemployment queues by Christmas.

The government is desperate to convince Australians that we've seen the worst of this—we've turned the corner, green shoots, things are getting better, it's all going to be okay, the government's got it in hand—but these facts don't lie. Things are getting worse. Despite the number of jobs that have already been lost, the government's own figures tell us that they're expecting 160,000 more Australians to join the unemployment queues by Christmas. We have not turned the corner. Things are getting worse for so many Australians. Yet the government continue down the path of cutting JobKeeper and JobSeeker. They excluded a huge range of workers from receiving JobKeeper in the first place, and now they want to constrain their hiring credit in a way that excludes so many workers and businesses. If the government were actually serious about trying to get our economy out of recession as quickly as possible and getting Australians back into work as quickly as possible then they would be listening to some of the suggestions that we have been making, which are intended to do exactly that.

The government has admitted through its figures in the budget that we won't get back to the pre-COVID unemployment level in Australia for years. This is not something that's about to end. And that's before we even get to the point about the more than one million Australians who are underemployed, who have work but want more. They might be getting five hours work a week, nowhere near enough to feed themselves and their families, and desperately want more. But the government just shrugs its shoulders and says, 'We'll do a bit here and there, but we're not going to try really hard to get that unemployment rate down to pre-COVID levels any time soon.' They're content to let things be and spend a bit of money—sure, I'll give them credit for that—but nowhere near the amount that is required to get unemployment down as quickly as it should be. This will have consequences for many humans. This means that families won't be able to feed themselves, kids will miss out on school excursions and a lot of Australians will go into poverty. That is a really great shame when the government has alternatives. It can do more to get people into work and to keep them in work. The options are available; recommendations are being made not just by Labor but by every think tank you care to speak to, but the government doesn't want to do that.

I note that this bill continues down a concerning path for the government, where it sets up enabling legislation for payments to be made but leaves the detail as to who receives what for the Treasurer to determine with a stroke of his pen. Unfortunately, that approach hasn't seen the Treasurer take up the opportunity to widen JobKeeper in the way that we asked him to. The approach hasn't seen the social security minister take the opportunity to increase the JobKeeper supplement in the way we have asked them to. We certainly acknowledge that there needs to be some flexibility for the government at this time, when things are changing rapidly, but the continued use of delegated legislation, like we see in this bill, means that the only option for the parliament to deal with any new rules that aren't fit for purpose or exclude people unfairly is by a disallowance motion, rather than actually proposing amendments, as you would normally do in the usual legislative process.

So far, one of the biggest concerns about this hiring credit measure that the government is putting forward is that it is yet another example of this government, and in particular this Prime Minister, being utterly obsessed with making announcements that do not stand up to scrutiny for more than the first headline. We know that this Prime Minister, with his marketing background and his obsession with marketing, really only cares about getting the headline that he's after, and then he runs away, never to be seen again, when issues arise about that announcement or about the promise not being delivered. We've seen it with the NAIF, the Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility, a $5 billion fund that, five years after it was announced, has spent less than five per cent of its funds. We've seen it with the Emergency Response Fund, a $4 billion fund that was set up, with the opposition's support, to provide additional disaster recovery and mitigation assistance. Eighteen months after it was announced, not a cent has been spent from that fund. We've seen it with the drought fund, we've seen it with urban congestion funds, we've seen it with the arts funds that the government announced but hasn't actually spent and now we're seeing it here as well.

When this initiative was first announced, the government was out there saying, 'This is going to create 450,000 new jobs.' Well, that should have rung warning bells, because we know that every jobs figure this government gives is grossly inflated. It didn't take many questions, I have to say, from my colleagues in Senate estimates to uncover that, in fact, only 45,000 new jobs are going to be created as a result of this initiative. I don't know why this government can't be honest with people about what its funding will actually deliver. If the funding is going to deliver 45,000 new jobs, then just say that; just be honest with people. Why does the government have to add a zero on the end to turn it into 450,000 new jobs when it's patently untrue and Treasury bureaucrats have confirmed that it's untrue? The only possible reason for doing that is that this Prime Minister and this government as a whole only care about getting a big headline. A judgement was obviously made that 45,000 new jobs wasn't going to cut it, wasn't going to get an announcement because it wasn't good enough—and it's not good enough!—so instead the government decided to add another zero to the end of that figure, turn it into 450,000 jobs, mislead Australians and get the headlines it was after.

The number of new jobs that will actually be created by this hiring credit is dwarfed by the number of Australians who have been deliberately excluded from receiving this hiring credit. We know that nearly one million Australians over 35 will not be eligible for this hiring credit. There will be many, many businesses that will not be eligible for this hiring credit, because they were receiving the JobKeeper payment. They were receiving JobKeeper payments because they were almost driven out of business. They're exactly the kinds of businesses that we should be getting behind to take on more people, to keep them afloat. Instead of that, again we see another example of the government tightening the screws, tightening eligibility, reducing the number of people and the number of businesses who can obtain support, just like they did by excluding people from getting JobKeeper in the first place and by cutting JobKeeper before the economy was ready for that to happen. Over and over again we see this government making decisions which will actually make this recession worse, which will leave more people unemployed for longer, which will delay the recovery and which will impose even more pain on Australians. The government's got to stop doing this.