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

They're the masters of marketing spin. They'd have you believe that the federal budget is a story about the Australian economy making a comeback. The Treasurer would have you believe that, through them spending $100 billion and plunging the Australian economy into a record trillion dollars of debt, the years of economic mismanagement by successive Liberal governments are behind us. But, if you read the fine print of the Morrison government's budget—the Ts and Cs—you see that real wages for Australian workers are forecast to decline in 2021, in 2022, in 2023 and in 2024. That means that the amount of money that Australian workers will take home this year and in the next three years, accounting for inflation, will go down. The middle class in this country will start to shrink. Our incomes will shrink along with it.

This is not a new phenomenon for the Morrison government. For five consecutive years before the COVID-19 pandemic, Australia suffered through record-low wage growth. Under this government, Australians have suffered through years of stagnant wages, and now they'll have to suffer through years of wage cuts. What sort of economic recovery is that? The Morrison government's only plan for years of stagnating or declining wages is to rack up record debt. Even then, the Morrison government is serving up to Australian workers—to the Australian middle class—a wage cut. Do not believe the Prime Minister's spin that this wage cut for Australian workers is as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, because the Prime Minister has for years, going back to his time as Treasurer, been delivering record-low wages growth for Australians.

We know why this is happening and we also know how to fix it, but the Morrison government is too ideologically blind to do what must be done. Years and years of stagnant or declining wages are the direct outcome of years and years of attacks on unions, years and years of attacks on workers' rights to come together and collectively bargain for their wages, years and years of attacks on the ability of unions to inspect books and expose wage and super theft, years and years of inaction on the rampant exploitation of migrant workers, and, of course, years and years of inaction on sham contracting and the exploitation of gig workers, casual workers and labour hire workers. Some of these people are getting paid as little as $6 an hour, undercutting what used to be good, fair-paying and often unionised jobs—middle-class jobs. Of course, this government has no plan to deal with those inherent problems for hardworking Australians.

For eight years Liberal governments have done nothing about these issues. Now, at the eleventh hour, with a trillion dollars of debt the Morrison government is hoping it can indiscriminately throw money around and fix them. The budget forecast says it all. After years and years of stagnant or declining wages, the Morrison government has spent $100 billion only to deliver more years of declining wages. Mr Acting Deputy President, you don't have to take my word for what the government's strategy and ideology are. The former Minister for Finance Senator Cormann himself said that low wage growth is 'a deliberate design feature of our economic architecture'. Low wages are the Morrison government's plan for this economy. They have been for years; Minister Cormann said it himself. And we know now that low wages will be the plan for years to come.

The problem the Morrison government is now running into is that Australian workers are not being paid fairly. When Australian workers have little money in their pockets and when the Australian middle class is shrinking, it means that middle-class Australians do not have the spare money to spend. When the Australian middle class has no money to spend, then there is no money there to stimulate the economy. This is the story of the sorry situation that the Morrison government now finds itself in. It can spend $100 billion of taxpayers' money and the economy remains a disaster. So what do the Australian middle class get in return for another four years of stagnant and declining wages? They get a one-off tax cut to see the Morrison government through an election and then a tax hike on top of their wage cut. The only real tax cut in this budget that isn't just a piece of cynical pre-election marketing is a tax cut to the super wealthy. Unlike the Australian middle class, the super wealthy get a permanent tax cut. That makes it clear who the Morrison government is really looking out for.

If you believe the Prime Minister and the Treasurer, aged care is supposedly a big winner in this budget. Let's look at the fine print and see what the real story is. The budget is supposed to be a response to the aged care royal commission, but, if you had to rate their response, it would be a pitiful two or three out of 10 at the most. Why do I say that? I say that for a very clear reason: the royal commission recommended very clearly that, to provide the care that older Australians need and deserve, the sector needs to have additional funding of $10 billion a year and a massive overhaul of workforce pay and conditions. I have been speaking to aged-care workers this morning and hearing about the devastating pressures that are on their employment—work that is directly procured and paid for by this government with no strategy or plan for that workforce that goes beyond minimal numbers.

Let's just make this point, which one of the workers made very clearly to me only an hour ago, about the deficient numbers that have been talked about in terms of training: when you come into an industry that pays only $21, then those people just don't stay. So, in actual fact, we're paying for training that's going to be a waste of money because we're actually not going to be able to have the people we train stay in those jobs. When people come and see the sorts of pressures that are in that industry, regardless of their love of care and desire to be in a caring industry, their capacity to raise a family and have a middle-class life is economically impacted by this government's direct ideological strategy of suppressing wages. There is no better example of this than aged care. We've heard the government announce only $3.5 billion a year, which is only one-third of what is needed and only one-third of what the royal commission into aged care said was needed. To this, there is no meaningful commitment to the pay and conditions of the carers who literally are the care in the sector. The heart of the aged-care sector is not the buildings and it's not the operating companies. There is no care without the workers. There was a once-in-a-generation opportunity to lift up the workers who do the most difficult, stressful, intimate and essential work of looking after older Australians, and this government once again has failed.

Let's look at what this budget has to offer to two critical Australian industries: aviation and tourism. Essentially nothing. Buried in those budget assumptions is the government's cataclysmic vaccine rollout failure. That failure means that international borders are assumed to be shut until mid-2022. The Prime Minister had one job. He outsourced quarantine to the states and he abandoned aged care to the ravages of the pandemic, so he literally had one job. That job was to get the vaccine rollout right, and he failed. Now we see the horrific consequences for pilots, flight attendants, engineers, baggage handlers, ground crew, catering staff, security guards and many more at our airports around the country, not to mention the thousands of tourism businesses that rely on international visitors and will struggle to keep their doors open and their workers employed for a few months, let alone until mid-2022. What's particularly disturbing is that the government's own report says mid-2022. They made the assumption that, in October this year, the aviation industry would be back up and flying. There'll be no announcement of new funding until that period.

Let's just look at this whole strategy for how, supposedly, international tourism will start to come back. Key industry bodies are saying it will not be until 2023. We've got skilled workers who are being lost from this industry because they've been made redundant by companies that have received billions of taxpayers' dollars from this government, with no obligation to keep those workers connected. Look at Qantas: right in the middle of the pandemic they laid off 2,500 workers who could have been receiving JobKeeper—and not a peep from this government. Well, in fact there was a peep: there was yelling of abuse from those on the opposite side at those 2½ thousand workers whose jobs were outsourced, saying they were just too middle class, that their wages could raise a family, that the companies that had won those contracts were getting paid less and that those middle-class jobs were gone. Well, this government saying the middle class is greedy is outrageous—particularly after they've spent billions of taxpayers' hard-earned dollars on these companies that, along with this government, have so dismally failed this industry.

Of course, we're a country that relies heavily on aviation. What we needed was a rescue package for the aviation sector with a focus on secure jobs and skill retention. Instead, we are facing a skills Armageddon in this lifeblood Australian industry. We've seen the contempt that the coalition has for good Australian jobs. They're apparently happy to abandon this industry, these workers and their families. But, when the industry finally reopens, the current, the power, needed for this industry to reopen will be greatly diminished.

You can't have an industry that lays off hundreds of pilots. You can't have an industry that lays off engineers for aircraft. You can't have an industry that hasn't done the hours and days required to train people to do the screening at our airports, which is of national security importance. Those people don't just come out of thin air—they need to be trained; they need to be skilled. So the government will be trying to turn the power back on for the aviation industry, and of course there will be no electrons coming through because those people will be out of the industry, as they've been made redundant. This government has failed to have a plan for how the aviation industry can get back into the air. There are so many examples of this government abandoning industry and workers and their families. We saw that with those dnata workers who were so dismally abandoned by this government—many thousands of workers in the food delivery sector of the industry.

Quite clearly, if we are going to talk about powering up the skills of our workers then we have to deal with the massive skills shortage we face, as we face a huge exodus from the aviation and tourism industries, with many workers already bleeding out to retail and logistics jobs—some of them even going to rideshare jobs. Of course, they're rideshare jobs that have no minimum standards, as this government says they're too complicated to give. It seems to be okay for other countries to work out how working people in those sectors can have minimum standards; in New York, in Seattle, in California, in the UK, in various countries in Europe and in parts of Asia they have. But, no; it's too complicated to work out how we can actually give decent jobs to Australians.

But what happens with this patchwork, particularly in the tourism industry, when these skilled workers go, is that we won't have the power to switch on the industry; we won't have the electricity coming through. What we've seen is a series of patchwork jobs on aviation. And now this government has very little to show for the $4.5 billion in assistance given over the past year. There was devastation for the industry, no future plan, yet we spent $4.5 billion. Despite putting billions into the coffers of the airlines, we have seen 10,000 jobs lost and more outsourcing. If you had a plan to decimate the airline and tourism industry and drain the skills from Australia, you couldn't do much better than what this government has done. If that was the intention, this government has done a great job of it. There is nothing in this budget that will fix that challenge.

This budget delivers a wage cut for Australians. This budget fails to deliver for the sectors that Liberal governments have repeatedly abandoned over the last eight years, such as aged care and aviation. Clearly, this budget fails to deliver any sort of economic recovery.