Murray Watt (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Northern Australia) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As we all know, Australia right now is in the grip of the Morrison recession, the worst recession our country has seen since the Great Depression. We know that this recession is worse than it needed to be because of the decisions of the Prime Minister, Mr Morrison, and his government. These include their decision to exclude over a million casuals and other workers from receiving the JobKeeper payment and their decision to cut the JobKeeper and JobSeeker payments when the country is in such a parlous economic state. The Morrison recession is going to harm our country for a long time to come and, unfortunately, so many Australians are paying the price.

You really would think that, when our country is experiencing the worst recession we have experienced since the Great Depression, the government would be doing everything it could to keep people in work and to keep money flowing through the economy and flowing into people's pockets so that they can spend that money in local shops and businesses. But of course what does it do? It does the opposite. The Morrison government has consciously decided to cut the JobKeeper payments and the JobSeeker payments while the economy is still weak and while unemployment is still growing.

Just in my own state of Queensland, there are hundreds of thousands of Queenslanders whose JobKeeper payments and JobSeeker payments and coronavirus supplement payments have been cut over the last few days. That is going to be terrible for those individuals and their families. But it's also going to be terrible for the local economies and local communities that those people live in, because they'll have less money to spend in local shops and businesses, which will send those businesses into further trouble and inevitably lead to further job cuts. Yet again we see that the LNP's answer to a crisis is cuts, cuts and cuts. In Queensland we know a lot about LNP cuts. It wasn't that long ago that we had an LNP government in Queensland headed by Campbell Newman, whose only solution to every problem was to cut and cut and cut.

They cut 14,000 jobs in the public sector, including frontline positions in our hospitals, in our schools and in our police services. They tried to sell anything that wasn't glued down and they cut funding to all sorts of other programs. Of course, standing right beside then Premier Campbell Newman was his Assistant Treasurer, Deb Frecklington, now the Leader of the Opposition in Queensland. She was there right by Mr Newman's side for every cut that he made, every asset he tried to sell, every program he tried to wind up, and she's at it again.

Just last night, on ABC TV in Queensland, Ms Frecklington faced one of her first interviews of the election campaign. She was asked repeatedly to rule out Public Service cuts and to answer a question about whether cuts to the public sector would only occur via natural attrition. She ducked and she dodged and she weaved time after time after time. She was asked a question about whether the numbers of Public Service frontline workers would be cut through natural attrition, and she would not give an answer. She wouldn't give an answer because she knows in her heart that she's going to do exactly what she did last time, when she was Assistant Treasurer, and that was to cut and sack and sell.

Ms Frecklington and the LNP are so desperate to win this election that they have made the unprecedented decision to preference every other party in Queensland ahead of the Labor Party. Their position when it comes to preferences is so unprincipled that they will preference anyone as long as it's not the Labor candidate, because that's how they've decided they are going to get elected to government. Of course, this is going to cause immense chaos at a time when Queensland needs immense stability to recover from the COVID crisis and the Morrison recession, because the result of this decision is that we face a ragtag coalition of LNP, Palmer, One Nation, Katter and Greens MPs running Queensland. Can you imagine trying to get any sensible decision about Queensland's future out of such a coalition?

If there is any sign of how diminished a figure one of the LNP's leading lights in Canberra, Senator Matt Canavan, has become, it is the decision of the LNP to preference the Greens ahead of Labor. Senator Canavan has made his career out of hating on the Greens. He says they're job destroyers. He says they're all sorts of things. And now his own party is deciding to preference the Greens ahead of the Labor Party. Just today, Senator Canavan criticised BHP for its decision to disaffiliate from the Resources Council over the Greens. He can't even make his own party listen. (Time expired)

Senate adjourned at 19:56