Andrew Bragg (NSW, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by the Minister for Finance (Senator Gallagher) and the Minister for Trade and Tourism (Senator Farrell) to questions without notice asked today.

What we've heard in question time today is a good opportunity to reflect upon the economic management of the nation and the statements that were made in the last parliament about expenditure and where we go from here. There were questions about certain components of the government's commitments to spend taxpayer funds. Of course, in the last parliament people who have short- or even medium-term memory will recall that it was the then opposition that was wanting JobKeeper to be paid to foreign nationals, foreign students and foreign corporations, and had a range of other expenditure proposals around paying Australians to go and get vaccinations even though we were in fact pretty much the most vaccinated nation on earth.

I understand that people like to make these statements when they're in opposition; I'll try and restrain myself while I'm here! But certainly it is a matter of public record that the Labor Party wanted to spend too much money. There will be analysis done over this period of time. We have gone through a historically high period of public expenditure. As someone who values intergenerational equity I would say that we spent perhaps more money than we should have, but it was a very significant crisis; it was a very significant economic shock. The talking point you hear from the government that there's X number of Liberal debt, or whatever else they say, ignores the fact that every reasonable person expected that the government of the day would put its hand in its pocket to protect and preserve the economy in large part as we knew it, as we tried to address the significant health and economic shock. So, yes, there was money spent. There may have been some wasteful spending on the margins, but the now government is in a very weak position to lecture the Liberal Party and the National Party, now the opposition, on expenditure, given its attempted expenditure of funds on foreign students, foreign corporations and the like in the last parliament. I think we will long remember the idea that we should pay Australians, the most vaccinated people on earth, effectively, to go and get a shot.

That's on the expenditure side. What we need to do in this parliament and future parliaments is improve the budget position. I don't think it's a fair approach for future generations that we are going to have a significant level of debt that will make it harder for us to prepare for future shocks. One of the issues we have in this place is that we have too few young people in the parliament. I think if we had some more younger people in the parliament—I'm not casting aspersions here or saying anyone should try and solve this problem today—we would take a longer view on the build-up of debt that has occurred over the past decade. At 35 per cent of GDP, our debt to GDP, it is a historically high position for the country, and we need to find a way to get that down. If we go above 50 per cent it would be very difficult for us to deploy the same economic measures that were deployed in the last parliament—and I say that many of those measures were deployed with bipartisan support. It is a challenge for us to try and look at the findings of the Intergenerational report. We have a significant issue with the tax base, a pretty adverse dependency ratio, so we want to try to improve that over the long term.

The other thing that was said today that was important was in relation to the tax side of the budget. We also want to, over the medium term, have a good look at how we can improve the sustainability of the tax base. We of course are too reliant upon direct taxation. We should over the long run look at how we can have a more sustainable and a more competitive approach to taxation.

Nita Green (Queensland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Bragg for the opportunity to contribute and to talk about the answers given by Senator Gallagher—and Senator Farrell, although we asked Senator Farrell that question. I'm a big fan of tourism, so I'm glad to be able to have that opportunity; thank you, Senator Bragg! Yes, it would be good to have more young people in parliament, and I congratulate Senator Payman on her election at 27 years old. She's going to make a fantastic senator, hopefully for many years to come.

The answers given by Minister Gallagher around our cost-of-living issues are important. We know that people in this country are hurting, and we know that this is a difficult economic time. It is a difficult set of economic books that we inherited from the previous government. These questions gave Minister Gallagher another opportunity to update the Senate on the economic situation that we are facing. It is very important that Australians understand—and I believe that they do understand this and that's why the members opposite are sitting on those benches now—that we inherited $1 trillion of Liberal debt. We are committed to fiscal responsibility, unlike those opposite.

Those opposite will tell you that that debt was incurred at a time when they couldn't possibly have not spent that money, but we know that they doubled the debt before COVID-19. They had doubled the debt before the COVID-19 crisis. We've inherited high inflation, rising interest rates and historically low wages because those opposite were not invested in lifting real wages and not interested in making sure that the minimum wage would rise. That's why we've got a situation now of high inflation and low wages. Those opposite were the highest-spending and highest-borrowing government in Australia. This is the really important point that Senator Gallagher made today, and those opposite would do well to listen—maybe before their next tactics meeting! It was how they spent their money that Australians really noticed. They spent that money in rorts, in colour coded spreadsheets and in buying off the National Party, and they did that in a systematic way. All they cared about was themselves, not delivering for all Australians.

That's not what the Albanese Labor government will be doing. We've already started the really hard work of dealing with the cost-of-living crisis. The Albanese Labor government secured an increase to the minimum wage—finally. Finally, for minimum-wage workers, we've increased the minimum wage by putting forward a genuine and sympathetic proposal to the Fair Work Commission. It was our first step in our plan to get real wages moving. On top of that, we've got a plan to reduce the cost of vital medicines to make them cheaper, cutting the maximum co-payment under the PBS by 29 per cent. We're also making it easier to get access to bulk billed health care, with the establishment of 50 urgent care clinics.

And, of course, as we know, we are improving access to and affordability of early childhood education. We know this will be instrumental for our economy. I'm always interested by the response from those opposite in regard to Labor's childcare policy of investing in child care and making child care cheaper. This is possibly not a view shared by everyone on the other side, but on this side we know that investing in child care is an economic policy. It's an economic policy because it saves families money and it gets people back to work. More affordable child care means more opportunities for families to increase their weekly pay. As Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said, this is a plan for reform that will deliver economic potential. It just makes sense.

Australians can also be assured that we are addressing the skills crisis. Senator Farrell today addressed the skills crisis that we have in our tourism industry right now, something that the former government refused to acknowledge or address in their time. The very first piece of legislation we introduced was to create Jobs and Skills Australia so that we could get on with the work of getting Australians into work. Jobs and Skills Australia will be pivotal for the economy and our economic recovery as we recover from 10 years of neglect, mistakes and mess, from $1 trillion of debt and from the rorts and waste that the previous government left behind for every Australian.

Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It's interesting. I'll just take off from Senator Green's comments about the skills crisis. The former coalition government spent $100 million on subsidising TAFE apprenticeships by 50 per cent. That was a fantastic scheme. It just goes to show that this is the party of the battlers now. Don't kid yourself. The party on the other side is the party that wants to throw money at the big end of town. Make no mistake about that.

What's interesting about question time is: whenever questions were put to Senator Gallagher, she had absolutely no answers for the way forward—absolutely no answers for the way forward. And I'll tell you what: you won't see anything from Senator Wong, either. I well remember when she turned up to RRAT and was trying to have a crack at us on the Leppington Triangle, claiming that we'd paid $30 million for a $3 million block of land, and Senator Sterle couldn't understand why I was being so quiet. Of course, I was just sitting back and letting Senator Wong show how little she understood about finance, because, had she actually understood accounting standards and valuation standards and prior case law, she would have known that you pay the best use—AASB 13, paragraphs 29 and 30. And if Senator Wong or anyone else on that side of the chamber would like a lesson in finance, I'm more than happy to help.

I won't just sit here and bag you out; I'll actually give you some free solutions. First of all, you've got to have identified the problem. And of course the problem was none other than Paul J Keating, who, under the Hawke government, basically ripped the guts out of the manufacturing sector in Victoria with the Button plan, and commoditised higher education with the Dawkins plan, where suddenly education was treated like just another commodity—'Anyone who wants a degree can get a degree'—and of course that gutted the TAFE sector. So we were throwing all this money into the university sector at the expense of the TAFE sector.

Now, let me get this very straight—and I want this on the record. This country was built by the battlers. It wasn't built by the blowhards. And you've got to put your primary industries in front of your secondary industries in front of your tertiary industries. We've got to get people back into those workshops, back into the manufacturing sector and back onto the farms and value-adding to our primary production. That's where we've got to go back to.

The way to do that is to cut taxes—and that is something that the coalition government has a proud record on—and also not shut the economy down. They like to bag out the former coalition government for the money that we spent. Well, let me assure you that, before the COVID crisis had broken out, we had balanced the budget. In 2018-19, the budget was balanced, for the first time in a number of decades—since, actually, the prior coalition government. But what happened was this. We had the state premiers just wrecking the economy. Now, I disagreed with the former Prime Minister on this, but he tried to set up a national cabinet in the best interests of the country. The country was sabotaged by Labor premiers, who continually locked down, who continually ran a fear program, who continually wanted to throw more money at it. Even when we pulled JobKeeper, Labor—the opposition at the time but now the government—wanted to keep spending money; they wanted to keep it going. This is the sad thing. And they're still going to pursue spending more money. They're going to drop $20 billion on building transmission lines for all these unreliables that aren't going to go 24 hours a day; they're not going to work when the sun isn't shining or anything like that.

If we want to get this country back on track, we need to invest in baseload energy. That's why I'm so pleased that the opposition leader, the member for Dickson, has now said that the coalition will look into nuclear as well. That's a fantastic idea. We can have coal, as well as nuclear, as well as gas. With cheap reliable energy, that is how we will power this country.

But, going forward, I'm still yet to hear anything about what the RBA does. This was another big stuff-up by the former Prime Minister, Paul Keating, when he gave the RBA independence. Anyone who has followed monetary policy as closely as I have for the last 30 years would know that all the RBA governors basically graduated from university and started work at the RBA. They are hoodwinked by RBA groupthink. They are more focused on inflation. And it is the tail that wags the dog, because let me tell you this. If you got washed up on a desert island, would you, (a) go to the bank, or (b) look to control the means of production? I'll tell you what you'd do: you'd look to control the means of production. You wouldn't go: 'Oh, well, we can't build any infrastructure because we might have too much inflation.' No, no, no. What we would do is: we would go out and we would actually start building, which is what we need to do.

And you should be listening to this, Senator Wong. I'm happy to walk you through it, because I know it's baby steps with you at the moment, but I'm more than happy to. We have to build. You guys have got to build if you want to get this economy back on track.

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

I also rise to respond to the answers from senators Gallagher and Farrell. I find interesting the constant referral to the fact that questions aren't being answered when just a brief, cursory glance at the transcript shows quite clearly that there are plenty of answers coming. There may not be sufficient listening occurring to understand those answers and then perhaps ask some further questions that may have a bit more relevance than what we have seen today.

Labor has a comprehensive fiscal plan. The Albanese Labor government has come forward with a comprehensive plan in a time of extreme uncertainty. We come in on the back of nine long years of rorts and wrecking, and our plan will start to give the country hope and start to turn that around into a productive economy and into further and better opportunities for the people of Australia. We have been clear with our approach to the October budget. We've been clear about the work that is going to be undertaken to review the waste and the rorts that have been occurring over the last nine years and that are evident in the March budget. We will trawl through that to find those rorts, to find that waste and to get rid of them. We will deliver on savings and we will then invest in the productive side of the economy. We will actually look to build things for the future, to build a pathway for the future in our manufacturing and in other industries that we know are critical to the future of Australia, rather than what we have seen from the current opposition when they were in government, where they borrowed more, oversaw a significant decline in productivity, spent more and taxed more. We've seen this over the last almost decade. But our plan to invest in the productive side of the economy will show that hope and will show that future pathway.

We will address the skills and training shortages, and that is going to start right now. Those conversations are on foot right now. The jobs and skills summit on 1 and 2 September will see that open, transparent and clear conversation, consulting with the critical people for whom this impacts and for whom we will take it forward. That includes the community. That includes business. That includes the unions. That includes the skills and training providers. These are the people who will make a difference as we build a productive future for Australia. We have procurement and co-investment strategies that will help business invest in those industries of the future that will build a better future for everyone in Australia.

We have a clear plan for cheaper, better energy. Yes, we will indeed look at the transmission lines. And, no, it is not a waste. These are the things that are going to ensure that we have an efficient and effective energy system into the future. We will look at developing further renewable energy because that is the way of the future and it is cheaper. We just need to stop having these attacks on areas where we know that renewables are cheaper. We know that for a fact. We know that there is a pathway to get them fully implemented into the system.

If you were to go down the path of nuclear energy, what would you do for the next umpteen years while you tried to develop that system? We don't need those things. We need to look at what we have on hand right now, and that is renewable energy as the cheapest, best way forward for the country. We have a plan to pursue that.

In addition, we care deeply about the people of this country. We care deeply about the economic future of this country, and the budget that will be delivered in October will chart that pathway. We are in a really, really difficult situation created by the opposition, the previous government, over nine long, wasteful, rorting years.

Susan McDonald (Queensland, National Party, Shadow Minister for Resources) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is fascinating to understand in greater detail each day the difference between those on this side and those on the other side and their understanding of what makes an economy work—what makes cost-of-living pressures work, what makes the cost of electricity work and what levers of government you can pull to make an economy successful. It doesn't matter how many times those opposite say words; it doesn't make them true. It just makes them tediously repetitive.

What I want to talk to you about, Mr Deputy President, is what it's really like to run a business and run a nation, and how proud I am of the legacy that we've left from the last nine years. We are one of only nine nations in the world to maintain a AAA credit rating following COVID, the greatest financial shock to the globe since the 1920s. I want to talk about how proud I am of the lowest unemployment rate in 50 years. That means people are at work in purposeful, meaningful work. That is incredibly important. We have left an economy that is ready to take advantage of the resources boom and the demand for Australia's agricultural industry. We are poised to take advantage of all of that, and we'll just have to see what Labor are going to do with the good fortune they have been left with.

The Treasurer has said that the point of his statement was to paint a picture of the economy. That is a gorgeous kind of description, but the economy is not an abstract painting. It requires a plan. It requires tough decisions in tough circumstances. What we are facing now, the tough circumstances of today, are higher costs of living faced by Australians. We know what that looks like. It looks like pain for small businesses, who are working 18 hours a day and struggling with not being able to find workers to help them to do the jobs which, in regional Australia, mean delivering the services that make everybody else's lives possible. It means families counting cents as they fill up the car, wondering whether, if they have to drive some distance to training, they can still have their children enrolled in sport. It looks like pain for Australians trying to build their first homes and students trying to create a better life for themselves. So the economy is not a mystery. The economy is made up of some very practical pieces. And I can tell you, Mr Deputy President, that the cost of power prices is one thing that today is crippling small businesses right across the country. I know from the days of running my business that there would not have been enough margin left to continue running it with the prices we have today. That is terrifying, because my business was providing food to families.

With regard to these power prices, we have to understand that the conversion to renewable energy takes time. It took a hundred years for oil to come in and take over from the horse, from horse power, and yet we want to change our economy within 15 years. Laugh if you will, Senator Hanson-Young, but it's not a laughing matter for those people who are going to pay the cost of transmission lines. Renewable energy projects that are being built in my part of the world are not being hooked up to the power lines, because they cannot take the intermittent voltage that is the result of renewables. In Queensland we don't even have reliable power now in renewable places, yet we're hooking up solar farms and wind farms that are just rusting away because nobody bothered to figure out whether or not the Queensland government would ever plug them in. That is why it is so important that we bring more gas supply to the market. We need to keep electricity reliable and dispatchable, an affirmed energy system, because it is not a laughing matter and it is not a fantasy. We cannot change our energy supply as fast as those opposite would like us to. I have no criticism of their aspirations, but we live in the real world where the absence of reliable transmission lines and firmed power means that we'll end up with no power at all. We'll end up without power to take ore out of the ground for the minerals that will reduce emissions.

Question agreed to.