Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Trade) Share this | Hansard source

and Mr Setka financed that hyper-militant organisation in all sorts of funny ways—they talk a lot of rubbish to building workers, made big promises that could be never kept. 'Back on track' was not only their slogan; it was the name of the election they ran in. They were some of the most disreputable characters in that industry that you'd want to meet. These were the forerunners of some of the issues that that union faces now.

Mr Chalmers has just this morning presented this ministerial statement. The last time that he did it outside of the normal budget and MYEFO opportunities that a Treasurer has was in mid-2022. These kinds of statements are what a responsible government does—treating Australians like adults, talking to them in an open and transparent way about the challenges that the economy faces, levelling with Australians, many of whom are still working with the challenges of increased prices in the economy and increased interest rates. They are working hard in practical ways to work their way through that. But if you cast your mind back to when the Treasurer last gave us a similar statement in the parliament, what was the situation? Inflation was at 6.1 per cent and rising, with no plan. With the tail of spending from the COVID period, there was no plan from the Morrison government—or what passed for the Morrison government then—in any way to substantially tackle the inflation challenge. No plan—the figures just arrived, and the coalition were helpless in the lead-up to an election, with no strategy at all to get Australians through that period. Interest rates were on the way up, but there was no plan from Mr Birmingham, Mr Frydenberg, Mr Morrison, Mr Taylor or Mr Dutton to deal with that challenge. Real wages were down by 3.4 per cent. You can hear the hooting and hollering up on the front bench here about real wages, but the last time they got an opportunity to touch wages policy, Australian were going backwards to the tune of 3.4 percent this year.

Back on track! Politics is about choices, and Australians will have to make some choices. If people think for a moment—I know the smug sense of entitlement over there leads them to think that automatically they are somehow good economic managers, but that smug sense of entitlement blinds them to the fact that Australians don't have to reach very far back at all. Just two years ago was the period when this show—the triumvirate of Mr Morrison, Mr Dutton and Mr Taylor—had their hands on the levers of economic policy, and you don't have to think too far back to know what that meant. Back to the Morrison period! The only thing missing is Mr Morrison himself, who of course occupied a series of simultaneous executive government positions secretly—no wonder economic policy-making was so debauched!

It was 15 years before there was a surplus. Mr Morrison and Mr Taylor—I'll come to Mr Taylor and his duplicity in these areas in a second—and Mr Frydenberg and Senator Hume and others talked about budget surpluses every day except the day they could never deliver one. They never delivered a single budget surplus—not one. It was 10 years of the lowest productivity growth on record—not compared to the year before, or the year before that.

What matters in productivity growth is the trajectory, and the trajectory was down for a decade. You can't grow an economy responsibly, you can't lift wages over time and you can't create opportunity for investment for Australians unless the curve starts to lift up. But the productivity line was going down for a decade. Some of the things that were shouted out by the crowd opposite during question time about productivity growth just show how they don't grasp the problem. It is true that labour productivity has fallen over the last year. Well, I'll let you into a little insight. If you've got a sluggish economy—as it is now, with lower levels of growth than normal—and one million people get jobs, labour productivity falls on the graph because there are more people and lower growth. But that is a good thing. I know that it's resented by the Liberal and National parties, who love nothing more than failure; they want to find failure in everything they see. But a million new jobs under this government, most of them permanent, is an unambiguously good thing. It's a record. It means Australians are earning more because there is more work in the economy and wages are lifting in a sustained and deliberate way—because lifting real wages is a design feature of our economy—and it means there are more Australians in work. Those opposite think that's a terrible thing.

We have seen the charges that have been laid about the fiscal position. All I say is this: two budget surpluses in a row and $80 billion worth of retired debt—lower interest rate payments in a high-interest-rate environment is a good thing—could never be delivered by the people who claim that they would make better economic managers. They could never deliver. Australians gave them a decade, and they could never deliver. And we are doing it for the right reason.

Finally, what sits underneath this claim about the fiscal position? They claim there's $300 billion of additional spending. But what are we going to cut under a Dutton government? Imagine the spectre of an angry, aggressive and reckless Dutton government. Are we going to cut aged care? Are we going to cut pensions and pension growth? Are we going to cut energy bill relief? Are we going to cut support for child care or students? Which bit will be cut in this $300 billion worth of cuts that are contemplated by the other side of politics, and what will it mean for people in Nowra, Port Stephens, Gladstone and Cairns when the government cuts services? We know what that will mean. (Time expired)

Question agreed to.