Anne Urquhart (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Finance (Senator Birmingham) to a question without notice asked by the Leader of the Opposition in the Senate (Senator Wong) today relating to wages growth.

Senator Wong's question concerned wage stagnation that the government that Senator Birmingham is part of has presided over for eight long years, wage stagnation which this budget predicts will continue. In fact, the budget that the Treasurer, Mr Frydenberg, brought down last night represents a real wages cut and is an admission of failure by this government. Even after spending $100 billion and racking up a trillion dollars in debt, the wages of Australian working people will still go backwards in this government's budget, which is a pretty extraordinary admission of failure. After everything Australian workers have been through together and particularly after the last year of struggle, the thanks they get from the Morrison government is a cut in real wages. It's a stunning outcome from the budget and not an outcome which this minister should be proud of in any shape or form. Yet, he responded to questions today with the smugness and spin that we've become accustomed to from this government, which is quite happy to make all sorts of announcements and walk away from the consequences for ordinary Australians.

That's what this government does: announcement, announcement, announcement, re-announcement, re-announcement, re-announcement. But they walk away from the consequences of their actions in budgets that affect ordinary Australians. We've seen the same shirking of responsibility from the Morrison government in the response to the horrific bushfires. We've seen it with the floods. We've seen it with recovery from natural disasters. We've seen it with quarantine and the vaccination rollout. We've seen it in aged care. We've seen it in that litany of failure with the vaccine rollout. They've continued to fail to act in the best interests of working Australians. We've seen a failure to take any responsibility and a failure to act.

Labor has said all along that part of the task at hand is getting unemployment down but also addressing underemployment. People can't find the hours of work that they need to support their loved ones. We know, and this minister knows, that, until that's addressed, we won't get wages growth. The minister knows very well there are other issues which are preventing people from getting good, secure, well-paid jobs.

Then we have the industrial relations system, the childcare system, skills and training, concentrated disadvantage—a whole range of issues which haven't just been ignored over the last eight long years of this government but have been actively made worse. Having racked up all that debt and spent all that money, Minister Birmingham and his government are missing a massive opportunity to set the economy up for a future where working people actually get a slice of the action when it comes to this economic recovery. It's simply not a recovery if Australian workers are worse off at the end than they were at the beginning. Deloitte Access Economics has forecast that workers could be waiting for up to five years for wages growth to return to two per cent. Two million Australians are either without a job or don't have enough hours, and wages are stagnant.

What is very, very clear is that this government is using the pandemic to continue to lock in low wages and insecure work, and it has every intention of continuing that mission. What we can look forward to under this government is a patchy recovery that's defined by even weaker wages growth, following record low wages growth under the Liberals prior to the pandemic. What we all know is that wages growth has been too slow for too long. With the current condition of our economy and the policies to repress wages presided over by this government, unemployment may need to go very low before wages growth hits acceptable levels and starts to feed through into inflation. This government has presided over a repression of wages in this country for eight long years. Huge numbers of jobs have been casualised and pushed into labour hire; there have been relentless attacks on unions, the offshoring of jobs, constant arguments for tiny or no increases in the minimum wage and a wages policy to crush the wages of its own employees that just beggars belief. What we need is real vision, not this pathetic rabble that responds to newspaper headlines and has no coherent plan for the country. (Time expired)