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

I'm delighted to get a cheer from the other side. It was obviously directed towards me, and I'll probably start to get used to it after a while. I should thank the last speaker for her contribution. It's only the modern National Party, really, that comes in here—after spending years apologising for projects that are announced with enormous buckets of money for dams that are never built, having spent years apologising for this hoax that's perpetrated on regional communities—at every budget breathlessly announcing more promises for more water infrastructure, promises that will never be kept. The announcement is for $560 million. Does anybody on earth really believe that the Morrison government, having made another announcement about another series of dam infrastructure projects, will ever build one?

I don't want to spend too much time on the Treasurer's performance last night, but it was one of the most lacklustre ones. You would think that a government that was announcing this much spending would really have their heart in it. I can see that the Treasurer and the Prime Minister have no difficulty executing this enormous political backflip, after having spent more than a decade telling the Australian community that debt and deficit were a crisis. As bold as brass, they're in the joint next door saying there's no problem. We're a trillion dollars in debt, with nothing to show for it—no reform, no infrastructure, no fixes to the big issues that face the Australian community—but here they are. It goes to Gough Whitlam's maxim that politics for the tories is like the art of rowing: you look in one direction but go in the other. That's okay for the Prime Minister and the Treasurer. It's not okay for the coalition backbench. Every time you turn a corner, you can hear a group of coalition backbenchers finding this subterfuge, this deception, this hypocrisy, very difficult to swallow.

It was an absolute snoozefest last night. The only thing that kept me awake during the Treasurer's performance was the hypocrisy. It made me reflect upon last year's budget, a budget that was similarly aimless. Good elements of the budget were the government committing to the proposals that Labor had made through the course of the year, particularly around the JobKeeper and JobSeeker increases that were Labor proposals. I remember, vividly, the former leader, in here, scoffing at Labor's proposals for wage subsidies to keep workers connected with their employers. Three weeks later, they were doing it.

What was the centrepiece, though, of the October budget? It was JobMaker. Does anybody remember the Treasurer, in his contribution last night, spruiking the achievements of the centrepiece of the 2020-21 budget, JobMaker? I don't think he will. The Treasurer and the Prime Minister promised Australians that 450,000 new jobs would be the product of that scheme. At the back end of a recession, a commitment to produce 450,000 jobs—more jobs than was required out of the Working Nation scheme at the back end of the recession in the 1990s—was a grand promise that should have filled regional communities full of hope for the jobs that were to come. What was delivered out of that promise? Well, in March, 609 jobs. By the time we get to this week, just around about 1,100 jobs out of 450,000 jobs—0.02 per cent. A 450,000 job promise; 0.02 per cent delivery. It's become the maxim that will define this miserable government: all promise and no delivery, all about the announcements and the marketing and the spin and never about the delivery for Australian households and Australian families. And where is it? Where is the JobMaker program in this year's budget? It's not up the front. It's in page 292 of the Regional Ministerial Budget Statement, literally four pages towards the end. That is political cowardice, and it will define this government.

The budget is just a political budget of course. It's absolutely not designed to fix the structural problems that the Australian community faces. After eight long years of chaos and self-interest, complacency and bungling and failure, what we have from this government is a political budget that is designed to paper over the cracks of eight years of failure. It is a shameless attempt at a political fix. It's not the genuine reform that we need.

What do we see this week? It's a very welcome development that sections of the Australian economy have bounced back faster than any economist or any commentator predicted. It's good to see. While we do see some shopping strips where shops are closed, where some sectors of the economy that need the government's support aren't getting it, it is welcome to see in aggregate terms some improvement.

What you see from the Morrison government is taking credit for the achievement of others. It's as if welcome news has got anything to do with what this government's done, with any reform that the government's conducted, with any attempt to address the underlying structural issues. No. Where there have been achievements, they have been achievements of the Australian people. Where there has been good work on the pandemic, good work on public health, it has been the work of the state governments—much of it undermined, much of it criticised, much of it politicised by those opposite, none more so than by the Prime Minister, who in his callous disregard for the public interest, poured scorn on the efforts of premiers to try and get control of the quarantine failures of the government. Is there anything in this budget about quarantine? Nope. Still the government pushes away responsibility for quarantine and border control. Bystanders usually don't get in the way, but somehow this government manages to be both bystander and get in the road and subsequently take credit for whenever it is that things go well.

Beyond the hype and the headlines, there is very little in this budget for ordinary Australians. Australians on modest incomes will get a modest tax cut, but they will get a tax hike after the election. There is nothing in this budget for families who've been held back by the Morrison government's failure to have a strategy on wages. In fact, baked in to the heart of this budget is an assumption that real wages will continue to be held back, and that means for many households real wages and household incomes will go backwards. While house prices rise and rents rise, wages for most Australians will continue to fall, and there is no strategy in this budget to deal with housing affordability and housing availability. There is no strategy to deal with falling wages and to deal with wage growth. That is the problem that is at the heart of this budget: it is all about the politics and not what's going to have an impact on the lives of ordinary Australians. There's no plan on wage growth. The previous Leader of the Government in the Senate, former Senator Cormann, said that falling wages, a brake on wages growth, was a design feature of this government's approach to wages. There is no strategy in this budget to fix that problem.

You can see it when you look at the government's halfway-house approach to aged care and child care. You would think that the impact of a royal commission interim report entitled Neglect would cause those opposite to reflect on the impact of the budget cuts to aged care that they delivered in 2014, which crippled the capacity of the aged-care sector to deliver decent care to elderly Australians. These people have worked for decades in the Australian economy. They have held the country up. They have contributed, and we owe it to them to make sure that they spend their final years in care in comfort and dignity. You would think that a report entitled Neglect could wake up even the miserable hearts of those opposite, causing them to reflect a little bit. What do we see? We see a halfway house on aged care. There's nothing in terms of wages for aged-care workers. You can fund all the training for aged-care workers that you want, but until you lift the wages of aged-care workers, until you improve their position in the labour market, you won't see the number of Australians working in aged care that you need to see. You can fund all the packages that you want, but you won't see the arrival of skilled workers committed to the care of elderly Australians. You won't see people go to those jobs to be paid 20 bucks an hour.

This is true of child care too. Last year, these characters opposite poured scorn on Anthony Albanese's commitment to delivering universal child care. We said, correctly, that providing universal child care was an important commitment for labour force participation, particularly for women, although child care is not just about women; it is about young men and about the welfare of children as well. We said that it was a productivity initiative. This government poured scorn on both the proposal and those two claims. What did we see yesterday? Mr Frydenberg was out there talking about productivity and labour force participation, but with a scheme that will help less than 25 per cent of the families that the Albanese Labor proposal would help.

There's nothing in terms of meaningful tax reform—no energy policy, no improvement. Energy prices have gone up almost every year of the term of this aimless government. There have been 21 different energy policy frameworks and no security for investment in cheap energy for the grid.

Affordable housing: there is no plan for housing and homelessness. There is an explosion in regional New South Wales, particularly in big towns such as Dubbo, Tamworth, Nowra, Albury and Wagga, of people sleeping rough. Families with young kids in the Hunter Valley are sleeping in tents. They have been forced out because the cost of rental housing continues to rise while household income continues to fall. Purchasing housing is out of reach for most ordinary Australians. What is there in the budget? There's nothing really, except a sound grab, a cruel hoax, that says, 'We're going to fund 10,000 single parents who can get a housing deposit of two per cent.' I don't believe them. I don't believe that this government will ever deliver on that meagre, tiny promise. It is a cruel hoax. It won't touch the sides of the housing affordability problem that is out there.

What are we seeing in infrastructure? Big announcements that are actually big cuts. There's a $3.3 billion cut to infrastructure spending in the fine print of the budget papers. Why is that? Why is there such a big gap between what the government says it will do and what it does do? People are learning there is no relationship between what the Prime Minister says and what actually happens—no relationship between what the Prime Minister announces and whether, in the real world, anything actually happens. That's what's going define this budget as much as it defines this government.