Tony Sheldon (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the government Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2020-2021, Appropriation Bill (No. 2) 2020-2021 and Appropriation (Parliamentary Departments) Bill (No. 1) 2020-2021. At a time when our economy and the working people of Australia face a crisis on a scale not seen since the Great Depression, the once-in-a-century pandemic has very quickly become a once-in-a-century employment catastrophe, with nearly one million unemployed and another two million underemployed.

Australian households, in the hundreds of thousands, have no-one in work or do not have enough work to pay even the basics of rent, mortgage, food and bills. The government expects that tens of thousands more will lose their jobs before Christmas and thousands more businesses are still at risk of going under. It's a deeply anxious time and, for many Australians, 2020 will be a deep scar. The scarring began with the 2019-20 bushfires and will end with a COVID Christmas. Christmas, hopefully, will be spent with family and friends. Nevertheless, there will be deep uncertainty for many as to whether they'll have a job or business in 2021. However, there is now some hope on the horizon. State borders are opening and vaccines are looking promising, but the reality is that this recovery will not be painless. For many Australians, there will be a recession in the economy for years to come, if we don't act.

The truth is that this government had to be dragged to put in a wage subsidy at all. Labor and the trade union movement were urging them to look at the wage subsidies in the UK, Europe and elsewhere. They made the case that keeping people connected to their jobs through the crisis was the No. 1 priority. Remember in March when they introduced the JobSeeker supplement but no wage subsidy and the mass lay-offs began? It was not until the Prime Minister and the Treasurer saw those Centrelink queues that they began to move.

With the hardline ideologists and the coalition caucus pushing against government expenditure on JobKeeper and JobSeeker, the government ended up with a JobKeeper package that left out more than a million casuals, gig workers, workers in the arts, university workers and aviation workers. All these Australians work hard and pay their taxes. Many have families to support. Many are not eligible for JobSeeker either. They're abandoned by this government. Their jobs were considered not worthy of keeping. So, as our borders reopen and businesses start to consider hiring again, the question now becomes: what sort of recovery are we going to have? At the heart of these appropriation bills is how effective this government's spending will be to revive our economy not just in the short term but also so we can have strong secure jobs for the future and the support and policy settings for industries that will be creating these jobs. Will the recovery be a short-term sugar rush of money thrown at some businesses to get them to employ people on a casual or temporary basis only to churn them out for new workers? Will it be a high-profile announcement from the Prime Minister designed to look at if unemployment and sluggish economic demand is being tackled, with little strategy and even less follow-up? Or will it be a government who faces up to the deep structural problems with employment and opportunity in this economy? Problems that we have already seen before the pandemic hit. Problems that are likely to be cemented by this pandemic. Of course, talking about endemic insecure work, growing underemployment, the crisis in skills training and the record low wages growth brought on by the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison government's policy of wage suppression is where the appropriations bill comes in. The Australian government has a historic opportunity, in this once-in-a-century crisis, to refashion and rebuild the skills, infrastructure, energy policy and social safety net that all of us need to succeed in the next 100 years.

How is the Prime Minister and his government deciding to spend our money? Will people be left behind? Will money be spent on rorts or recovery? The nearly $1 trillion in debt that they have racked up should be expected to get us a long way to tackling the root causes of what was a very sluggish, underperforming economy before COVID. Well, the signs aren't good. Firstly, they're clearly pulling the JobKeeper and JobSeeker supplement out of the economy well too soon. For the 1.5 million Australians still reliant on JobKeeper, the cuts to this subsidy come at the worst possible time. Overnight the Treasurer has been spinning the reduction in people on JobKeeper as a positive story. The numbers are welcome but given the border restrictions easing and the tighter eligibility that is not a big surprise. The real question we should be asking is: why commit to spending hundreds of millions on a wage subsidy if you wrench that money out of the economy before there are viable businesses and jobs to replace it? Why, when we know that low-income people spend pretty much every dollar they get, would you take away the JobSeeker supplement and both injure the bottom line of local business when they're desperate for customers and cruelly drop tens of thousands of families back below the poverty line?

Secondly, the government's own estimates have employment staying below pre-COVID levels for at least four years. And what is the government's jobs plan? Well, there isn't one. Of course, one of the centrepieces of their spending is the $4 billion so-called JobMaker hiring credit. But on closer examination this scheme proved not to be the huge support to the economy that was first promised. This is a scheme designed to replace JobKeeper when it ends in March. While JobKeeper was flawed primarily because it left so many workers out, this new scheme will leave even more Australians behind.

This morning on ABC TV, one of Australia's most loved stars, Bernard Fanning, from Powderfinger was interviewed about the band's new album. He had an important shout-out for Scott Morrison, the Prime Minister, about the treatment by his government of our arts industry. He said of the government that there have been a lot of announcements but little action. When it comes to supporting the arts industry this isn't the first time he has spoken out. For months he has been saying that the highly-trained professionals in arts and entertainment may be lost for the industry forever. In his words, they have been:

… forced to completely change careers because there has been no work and if they don't come back, there may not be enough behind-the-scenes people to support tours when they get back up and running …

That means devastation to the industry.

My colleague in the other place—the shadow minister for industrial relations and the arts—has been relentless in his support for arts industry. The industry, along with aviation, was hit first and hardest. Aviation and the arts will also be the industries that will have the restrictions on them removed last. Aviation workers who used to work for Qantas but, after a sale allowed by this government, became employees of dnata had to watch while other workers in the industry got JobKeeper, but the ownership structure of their company saw the government deny them a connection to their jobs. Many of these workers live in the shire, in the Prime Minister's own electorate, but still they're shut out—the tin ear of the Prime Minister.

Meanwhile, more than a million casuals and gig workers were also shut out, creating a double blow for their families and for the local businesses that rely on their spending. University workers were punished for ideological reasons, forced to rely increasingly on income from overseas students because of government funding cuts. When this revenue dried up the government denied the sector JobKeeper. They are literally letting universities bleed out staff and courses at a time when Australians have no jobs and many want to get a tertiary education.

Now we have JobMaker, which is also defined by who in Australia's workforce it leaves out. The Prime Minister, with his usual fanfare, claimed that JobMaker would support 450,000 jobs. That sounds good, except you always have to read the fine print with this mob. In this case, a Senate estimates hearing saw bureaucrats admit that only 45,000 of those jobs would actually be new jobs—only one-tenth of what was claimed would be created. Forty-five thousand jobs is not much of a dent in one million unemployed. Meanwhile, when we saw who was actually eligible for this new $100- to $200-per-week subsidy, the alarm bells started ringing. It became clear that, rather than JobMaker, what they'd created was 'JobTaker', 'JobChurner' or 'JobDestroyer'. In fact, if you wanted to create an incentive for businesses to replace their existing staff with younger workers who would get a short-term job and then be churned for another short-term worker, this is the scheme you would design. Not only will your existing staff on JobKeeper not be eligible for the subsidy when JobKeeper winds up in March; to be eligible for JobMaker you have to be aged 18 to 35 years, and the full subsidy goes only to those aged up to 30 years.

So there was a trillion dollars of spending by this government in the October budget but nothing for workers over 35. That's 928,000 people who are on unemployment benefits but cannot benefit from the scheme—no matter that they are experienced and qualified and the employer wants to hire them. Even if you're under 35 the subsidy is for only a year, so it's very unlikely that this scheme will create long-term, secure jobs for young people in the recession. In fact, it's aimed at people who work as few as 20 hours a week. The government has already gutted apprenticeships, cut billions from TAFE, hiked university fees, taken away penalty rates and, in the middle of a pandemic, told people that if you're without work and cannot get JobKeeper then you'll have to raid your own superannuation retirement nest egg just to pay your bills.

Nothing in these appropriation bills shows any real desire to tackle our job crisis. This is our money, and it's right that, in a recession, the government uses the budget to step in when the private sector cannot support jobs. But the public money should be used for long-term investment in infrastructure, education and skills, not as a short-term political fix that looks suspiciously like a pre-election pump of the economy. This government's recent record on spending does not inspire confidence. Last month it was revealed that the federal government spent $30 million on land near Sydney airport at Leppington, only to see it valued at $3 million. Of course, that's now being investigated by the AFP for fraud. The government also hopes COVID-19 will provide cover for the $100 million sports rorts scandal.

We know that this is standard operating procedure of the Liberal-National party. Just last week, New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian was questioned about the ever-growing scandal of her office's involvement in a $140 million scheme that gave 95 per cent of sports and community grants to Liberal, marginal and targeted seats. She flat out admitted that pork-barrelling was common practice and that it was okay because it was not illegal. When the federal government's sports rorts were uncovered by the Australian National Audit Office earlier this year, the Prime Minister acted the way we have come to expect when he is caught spending public money to further his own political interests; he announced a sham investigation, a self-investigation by his former chief of staff and now head of the Prime Minister's department.

As I mentioned before on the aviation industry—and I heard an announcement today—money was spent to keep people connected with their jobs. But this government doesn't connect them with their jobs. They've not only allowed 6,900 workers to be thrown out of Qantas; they've also just announced they won't take a bid from the 2½ thousand workers that have been replaced by lower-paid workers. It has the same ring as JobMaker—all talk, no action, and people get it in the neck. We see this government not hold Qantas to account, right on the verge of where so many of these workers reside in the Prime Minister's electorate. We have hundreds of thousands of people needlessly left behind. We have spending on rorts, not recovery. We have a government that doesn't hold to account those to whom they give hundreds of millions of dollars to keep people connected with their jobs. Appropriations in this government seem to be indistinguishable from misappropriations.