Karen Grogan (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I also rise to speak on this motion from Senator Hanson-Young. The Australian economy is still growing. We know that we've got significant challenges out there. The economy is still growing. We read every single day in the paper that high inflation is impacting people all across the country. The most recent number is 6.1. Now, obviously, the result of that is significantly increasing interest rates, and that has an impact on every single person across our country. One full per cent between June and July: that's huge when that gets applied to every good and service that people are interfacing with. We know this, and we know that the Reserve Bank has been clear that there's more to come. So, yes, we need to do something. We need a plan. There needs to be things done to make it easier on the people across our country to cope with this economic scenario. These rate rises hurt every single person—their mortgages. The numbers were quoted in this house earlier today and yesterday, and no doubt will be quoted again and again as they keep increasing.

The causes of this inflation are primarily, but not exclusively, global. We've inherited nine years of mess, nine years of debt—debt to the tune of a trillion dollars—and there's nothing to show for it. In nine years, there were opportunities to pursue renewable innovation: things that would have strengthened our country, that would have made us more prepared for an economic downturn and that would have made us better prepared for global influence—things that we cannot influence terribly well when they happen but which we can prepare for. We could have built a stronger economy, but we didn't do that.

Those opposite, when they were in government, wasted nine long years. They left workers worse off, in particular. The former finance minister Mathias Cormann said that they were intentionally making workers worse off by making low wages 'a deliberate design feature' of the Australian economy. Now, that was a shameful thing to do. It is a shameful thing that has been done to the workers in this country—the workers who have contributed, who work hard to try and put food on the table and pay their rent or pay their mortgage. They've just been so totally disrespected over the last nine long years.

The coalition left us in an economic mess, through a decade of domestic failure on skills, on supply chains and on energy. In the skills area, they just gutted some of our excellent training facilities and our whole system of building the next generation of young people trained in the skills of the future, trained for the jobs of the future, as our skills mix changes as industries change. Nothing has been done to prepare for that, which is a disgrace. We now have a skills shortage that we didn't need to have. Some foresight, some planning, would have addressed that. But, no—we did not see that.

So we do have a plan to tackle these issues. The Albanese government has a plan to tackle the economic crisis that was left to us by those opposite, and the Australian people endorsed that plan in May at the election. As the Treasurer laid out earlier, we have a convergence of challenges facing us the likes of which comes around once in a generation. It's a once-in-a-generation challenge that represents a once-in-a-generation opportunity. We have an opportunity, and we're going to take it. It's the opportunity to build a better future: to make sure that people can get good, solid, well-paying jobs that are sustainable, so that they can see a future and are not grappling from day to day, from month to month—so that they actually can look with hope towards the future.

Our plan started very early on with us ensuring that the lowest-paid workers in our economy got a pay rise of 5.2 per cent. Now, it's not enough, but that is a huge leap forward and the first time in a long time that those people have had any sort of sense of hope about where their wages are going—that they are not constantly going backwards but are starting to catch up.

The audit of rorts and waste that's being conducted by the Minister for Finance and the Treasurer is going to go through that budget from March, line by line, and unpack all of the waste and all of the terrible decisions that were made that do nothing to build our country—nothing. We will ensure that spending is focused clearly on building value and building a better future and is not spent on buying votes or giving money to your mates. That's not how we are going to behave. That is not how we intend to manage our budget.

So, importantly, we have a plan to lift the speed limit on the economy and stop the decade of stagnation that we've seen. Firstly, we will help everyone with the cost of living by doing a couple of key things. Now, child care is obviously a critical issue. People's ability to go to work is impacted significantly by the child care that they can find and the child care that they can afford. So one of the things we will be doing is cutting the cost of child care for 1.2 million families so that they can work out their family budget, have the children in child care, know that they can afford it, go and build their careers, and engage in some of the great training opportunities that we will be bringing forward—so that they can build a future for their family.

We're also cutting the cost of medicine by $12.50 a script. Medicine is a really important aspect of people's budgets, and we know that, when faced with a choice about what they're going to drop when there isn't enough money to put food on the table, pay the rent and pay the bills, people will often drop their medication, which means that their health is significantly impacted and sometimes spirals into more serious health problems. So cutting the cost of medicine will address that as well.

We'll ensure that wages grow over time by supporting decent wages in the care economy and by investing in the industries that are going to deliver secure and well-paid jobs. We'll invest in the skills necessary. We'll be working with business and with unions to ensure that businesses can hire the people they need and that Australians are trained for these new industries that are coming forward, for the opportunities that we really clearly see—opportunities in renewable energy, obviously. Certainly, in my home state of South Australia, we're all very excited about the hydrogen future that may be available to us, and there's an awful lot of work going on there that we're very proud of.

We're also going to fix our supply chains and deal with the supply side of an inflation challenge by investing in cleaner, cheaper, more reliable energy. And, as I've said a couple of times this week in this chamber, our plan for our energy grid, our plan for renewables and our plan to lower the cost of energy for households are all on foot. These things are going to make a big difference. They're not only going to create jobs; they're not only going to put us on the map in terms of innovation; they're also going to deliver solid future jobs, well-paid jobs, for people.

Turning to tax reform, our priority, our significant priority at the moment, will be to ensure that multinationals pay their fair share of tax here in Australia. Multinational companies operating across borders are far too able to shift their profits to low- or no-tax jurisdictions to avoid paying tax in countries like Australia. These practices have become more sophisticated, as companies use intangible assets such as intellectual property and hold them in low-tax jurisdictions. The rapid growth of the digital economy has completely exacerbated this issue. As the Treasurer referred to earlier today, one of the key things that we'll be doing is supporting the OECD's two-pillar solution of a global 15 per cent minimum tax to ensure that some of the profits of the largest multinationals, particularly digital firms, are taxed where the products or services are sold. This is going to assist with our budget repair, and it will help level the playing field for Australian businesses, who are far too often negatively impacted because a multinational or an overseas based company can do exactly this and Australian companies are not able to—nor should they want to. We should be paying our taxes and we should be proudly paying our taxes. But our taxes should not be creating an extra burden on legitimate business activity.

So we have an economic plan, and it's clear, it's deliberate and it's a direct response to the challenges left to us by those opposite—a wasted decade, almost, of coalition governments. Labor's five-point economic plan is calibrated to reduce cost of living, drive productivity growth and expand the capacity of the economy to alleviate supply-side pressures. We will get wages growing so Australians aren't held back or left behind, as I've said, and invest our public money in a way that delivers genuine economic value for Australians. These are the critical points in our economic plan that we will deliver on and will make a difference, and we will do it with transparency and we will do it in conversation and in partnership with businesses, the unions and the community. This is all of us working together. That is what we will deliver.

So we won't be supporting this motion. We've been upfront about the growing challenges facing our economy, including high and rising inflation, rising interest rates, skyrocketing cost of living and $1 trillion of debt. These challenges have been exacerbated by nearly a decade of wasted opportunities and wrong priorities by those opposite. Our economic plan, as I say, is a very deliberate, direct response to the growing pressures we have been left with. We will continue working hard to provide responsible and permanent cost-of-living relief. These things will be laid out fully in our budget in October as we work through the March budget, find the savings, redirect the money and start to look at how we can improve the lives of people across this country. Our priority, as I said, in tax will be the multinationals. We will work very hard with our international partners and right here at home to deliver on those promises and deliver those savings which we can then turn into opportunities for Australians—opportunities to address our cost-of-living pressures.