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

I'll get through the remainder of my speech in the next seven minutes, having begun just before question time today. I'm sure senators opposite have been waiting with bated breath for me to resume this speech. I aim not to disappoint.

What I was talking about prior to question time, when we were debating these appropriation bills, was that there's an alarming tendency in this government—which we're seeing again this week—to clutch at any piece of data that they say indicates that the economy is performing well under their stewardship. As I foreshadowed, we have already seen that this week in relation to what the government expects is going to come out of the national accounts data later in the week. The government is preparing the ground for that data in their intention to show that the recession in Australia is over. We saw a little bit of that from the government in question time today. As I was saying before question time, if we do see this continued pattern from the government in arguing that the economy has recovered and that things are going tickety-boo in the Australian economy, all that will demonstrate is exactly how out of touch this government is with what is really happening out there in Australia.

Even the most recent unemployment figures show that unemployment is now at seven per cent, with another 10.4 per cent of the Australian population underemployed. That's over 17 per cent of the Australian population either out of work or seeking more hours than they can find. That's one way of showing that, whatever the government might be saying, in fact many Australians are doing it really tough right now. That old barometer of the state of the economy is empty shops. I do a lot of travelling in my job. In the last couple of weeks alone I've been in Darwin, Rockhampton, Brisbane, the Gold Coast and probably other places that I've forgotten. Everywhere I go, I see empty shops in shopping districts. Even from talking to some of my colleagues today, I know that similar things are going on in their towns and cities right across Australia. So, again, whatever we see and hear from the government about the economy improving, that anecdotal evidence as well as statistical evidence from the Bureau of Statistics shows that in fact at the moment things are really tough for people.

People are particularly concerned about what this government's plans are come March, when the JobKeeper payment is scheduled to end, when the coronavirus supplement is scheduled to end and when we also expect to see banks calling in loans from small businesses and homeowners who have been able to defer their mortgage. Already under this government's leadership we're seeing more pain to Australians and to the wider Australian economy than is necessary, because this government has made decisions to exclude so many people from JobKeeper. The government has wound down JobKeeper and the coronavirus supplement too soon, before the economy has fully recovered and in defiance of warnings from the Reserve Bank of Australia and other economic experts. But that's exactly what we're seeing from this government.

We saw it again in the budget, which these bills relate to, where the government has made a conscious decision to continue excluding categories of people and categories of workers from government support. Just one example in this year's budget is the government's decision to exclude workers over the age of 35 from the hiring subsidy, which means that nearly a million people who are over 35 and currently unemployed will not be able to attract a hiring subsidy from the government when they seek employment with a new employer. That is obviously going to lead employers to exclude older workers not just from receiving the hiring subsidy but from actually getting a job. We already know from the figures that are coming out of the Bureau of Statistics and other economic commentators that older workers are finding it harder to find work and are languishing on the unemployment queues longer. Yet this government has decided, with this budget, to exclude those older workers from receiving the hiring subsidy—another example of the government's conscious decisions making things worse for people: extending the recession, deepening the recession, prolonging the pain.

It doesn't have to be this way. We have been attempting to get the government to reverse course on some of these decisions, whether it be excluding older workers from receiving a hiring subsidy or the decision—made what seems like years ago but was only months ago—to exclude casuals, migrant workers, university workers, council workers, arts and entertainment workers and many other categories from receiving the JobKeeper payment. So it's this government's decisions that are making things worse for so many Australians and making the recession go longer than it needs to.

Of course, there were so many other things that were missing from the budget that the country desperately needs from this government. There was no plan for child care, no proper plan for aged care, no plan for energy policy, no plan for the future of JobSeeker recipients—so many things that are essential to the current state of the economy but also to setting Australia up to really rebound in this recovery. And all of those things have been omitted by the government. They seem to be putting all their eggs in the basket of granting tax concessions to business, some of which we support. But that's not enough on its own. There are so many other things that this government needs to be doing and isn't doing to make sure that we do come out of the recession as quickly as possible. And it is a real shame that, in contrast, what this government does is to keep making decisions that are going to make the recession worse.