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

Madam Acting Deputy President Stoker, I think the last time I was in this position while you were in that position I was a little hot under the collar and you invited me to withdraw a remark and I remember declining to withdraw it. On reflection, I will just say that I am listening and learning every day and that I regret putting you in a difficult position on that afternoon. So I thought I would start out that way with a slightly conciliatory tone and end that there.

It's been almost two months since the Treasurer, Mr Frydenberg, announced the 2019-20 budget. It looked pretty weak on the day and the last two months haven't strengthened the perceptions of the community about the government's capacity to manage its way to economic recovery. Two months later, the budget still looks like the cheap, weak document that it was on the day that it was announced. It is pretty hard to imagine a circumstance where you could navigate up towards a $213 billion deficit this financial year and still have most people in the community unable to say what the budget has actually done. There's $480 billion worth of cumulative deficits over the forward estimates, with deficits projected for the next decade. Our net debt is to peak at $966 billion, 43.8 per cent of GDP, in 2023-24.

The Labor critique of this budget is not about the debt itself. I remember being on my feet in this place at the beginning of this year and passionately arguing that the Australian government should deliver a wage subsidy to support jobs and businesses through this recession. I argued it passionately because I could see in the faces of those opposite that their stoic refusal at the time to do that—their decrying of anybody who made an argument that the Australian government should be stepping in to support businesses, wages and the jobless through this crisis—would lead to a terrible outcome for the Australian economy. I remember that very well, and I remember the government's welcome backflip a week later.

Our critique is not of the debt itself. Our criticism is that very little has been achieved with it. Our criticism is that it's inexplicable, really, that you could shovel this much money out the door and have nothing to show for it. The largest deficit delivered by the previous Labor government was $54.5 billion in 2009-2010. It was a budget deficit that was the result of effective stimulus during the GFC period. What did that deliver? It delivered Australia as the only country in the OECD that did not fall into recession. That's a pretty bland assertion on the face of it, but for me on this side, growing up in a country town and spending most of my working life in and around the manufacturing industry, I know what a recession delivers in terms of long-term unemployment, social dislocation and misery. But that $54 billion deficit prompted so much opportunistic hand-wringing, complaining, bleating, moaning, groaning and propagandising. I'll never forget the budget deficit bus that some of the characters opposite used to ride around in through regional Queensland and regional New South Wales, and bothering people in every little country town in Victoria. You could not deliver a budget debt truck big enough to put the numbers on it for the kind of deficit that the characters opposite have delivered. It would need to be in 12-point font in order to get all of the digits onto an ordinary bus or truck.

People are entitled to ask what is being delivered in terms of lasting infrastructure for this trillion dollars. Is it lasting social reform, lasting economic reform? The answer is, 'Not very much'. This was supposed to be a budget that created jobs. By the government's own estimates it will take four years for unemployment to return to pre-crisis levels. That's four years where some people who are unemployed today will still be unemployed, presumably in our outer suburbs and presumably in our regional towns. There's no plan for child care. There's no proper plan for aged care. How you could get to a point where there's a trillion dollars in debt yet not have lifted a finger in the face of the Neglect report that the government received about aged care is beyond me.

There is no plan for energy. The government is entirely isolated on energy policy. Now the New South Wales Liberal government has had to step in to do what the Commonwealth government should always have done and lead the way. Every state and territory has a plan on energy policy. This lot, constrained by outdated and, mostly, pretty dopey ideology around energy policy, is unable to act in the national interest. A trillion dollars has gone but there is no outcome on energy policy.

There is no plan for social housing. It has taken the Victorian government to announce it's spending around $5 billion on much-needed social and public housing. I think it was Mr Wilson, the member for Goldstein, a place where there's probably not much need for social housing—no, actually, it was Mr Falinski, the member for Mackellar, who said, if I recall correctly, that he'd prefer it if people just went out and bought their own homes. What an extraordinarily narcissistic, out-of-touch sort of proposition! Does he know there are a thousand people in Mackellar on public housing waiting lists? Perhaps he should go and meet them.

There's no plan for the future of JobKeeper recipients. Instead, we've just got a grab bag of announcements and marketing programs. It didn't take long—there was not a cent out the door of the Emergency Response Fund as bushfires started to rage around the country last week, and there was nothing out the door of the Northern Australia Infrastructure Fund—to get the marketing machine going for this budget. The ads for the budget were up on billboards within days—focus group tested and ready to roll—in supermarkets and shopping centres, in ethnic media and right across our newspapers. The advertisements were ready to go. The economic recovery plan ads were on TV with the tagline 'Our Comeback'.

I asked in estimates how much the government planned to spend publicly congratulating itself on its budget. The answer was 'nobody knows'. 'You can only know the full cost of a campaign once it has started,' I was told. So we will have to wait for this government come back and tell us in future estimates how much the Our Comeback campaign really cost. What we do know from estimates is that it has involved millions of dollars going to Liberal Party mates to conduct thinly disguised political research for the benefit of the Prime Minister and his political party—millions of dollars to their focus group research mates in an unprecedented venal attempt to make sure funds that should properly be spent by political parties doing their research have instead been expended by the Australian taxpayer in the interests of the Prime Minister and his political party. It's a budget of blank cheques—blank cheques to government ministers, blank cheques for the private sector, especially the extraordinary write-off provisions, and blank cheques to the advertising industry. It's a complete failure of imagination to deliver spending and projects that will benefit Australian taxpayers.

How did we get so little? If you want an answer to that question, have a look at the JobMaker program—poor planning, no accountability, wilful ideological blindness leaving hundreds of thousands of vulnerable Australians behind. It is a $40 billion wage subsidy program that you could not have designed to be less effective. It seems to be wilfully designed to be ineffective, to be incapable of delivering. The program itself is almost as large as the second Rudd stimulus package and twice as big as the Building the Education Revolution program. On budget night—you can see the punchline coming here from miles off—the government promised 450,000 jobs. As soon as the words come out of their mouths, you know it is not credible, not achievable, marketing spin, an announcement with no delivery—450,000 jobs.

It didn't take long for that to fall apart. In budget estimates, Treasury officials, no doubt used to enduring this sort of nonsense from their political masters, had to explain why it wasn't true. They said 450,000 was an estimate of the take-up of the program given the current outlook. 'It's not the same as 450,000 jobs being created,' they said. So the claim is a distortion. They went on to say:

In costing this, we have made a conservative assumption that about 10 per cent of employment in these firms is genuinely additional, it wouldn’t have happened were it not for the hiring credit.

The government announced that it was creating 450,000 jobs. The actual figure is 10 per cent of that—45,000 jobs. In reality, it is a statistical blip. It is not 450,000 jobs; it is $90,000 per actual job created.

According to Treasury, and indeed the Grattan Institute, the average full-time wage is $81,000, the average wage for all workers is about $62,000, the median wage is about $55,000, the median tax-file income is $45,000 and teachers earn on average about $70,000. The government could have hired 45,000 nurses and it would have spent less money and created the same number of jobs. Research out this week has shown that New South Wales students have fallen three to four months behind in key areas such as reading and numeracy over the course of the pandemic. Effects have been worse for the poorest 24 per cent of families and particularly those in rural Australia. Meanwhile, the same pandemic has left many casual teachers unemployed. The Grattan Institute proposed a six-month tutoring blitz to help one million disadvantaged school students recover learning that was lost during the COVID-19 lockdown, but there is no announcement on that scale, no capacity to deliver the kinds of reform programs that the country needs.

It was an extraordinary decision to spend $40 billion in a way that most perversely excludes almost a million unemployed workers—you see, the program leaves out people over the age of 35; they are stone-cold left out of the labour market stimulus program. There are 928,000 Australians over the age of 35 on unemployment benefits—that is, 57 per cent of people on unemployment benefits. The Morrison government has those 982,000 people over the age of 35 now competing with Australians under the age of 35, whose wages will be subsidised. If you're in a country town and you can't find a job, if you're in the outer suburbs and you can't find a job, if you're over the age of 35 and you can't find a job, it's pretty clear where the finger of blame should point: squarely at the Morrison government. The Morrison government is a government without the capacity to imagine or to deliver reasonable reform. (Time expired)