Anika Wells (Lilley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Shut it down! Going to the issue of intergenerational inequality, economic growth has been slow for a decade. Australia's population is ageing. Climate change looms. The burden of these changes falls mainly on the young. Young people face real concerns about housing affordability, stagnating wealth and incomes and future budget pressures.

It is a wonderfully conservative idea to carry on about the left redistributing wealth. We heard it again in question time today, when they themselves actively seek to redistribute wealth in the opposite direction. In Great Britain, 75 per cent of 18- to 24-year-olds voted to remain in the EU in 2016, whereas 66 per cent of those aged 65 to 74 voted to leave. Guess which side won? In Australia, at the 2019 election, Scott Morrison's government was elected with one of the lowest voter turnouts since the advent of compulsory voting as the nation's young turned their back on this democracy, after enrolling in droves for the same sex marriage postal survey. That being said, electorates with higher proportions of younger people were more likely to swing towards Labor.

Put it all together, and it's hard to shake off the feeling that politics is currently being driven by older people against the wishes of the young. The age related voting divide isn't about generational warfare; it is actually driven by economic disparity which is produced by politics, not by people. Intergenerational inequality is often presented as a zero-sum battleground between the old and the young, usually by people who wish to see their structural advantage endure. But it doesn't have to be a zero-sum game. We are in this together. Millennials are in precarious work with low incomes. That means they may not be able to provide the necessary tax revenues to support boomers in their twilight years. The current rate at which earnings are growing will not fund our future welfare needs. Overburdened hospitals and cuts to social care don't help any generation; they make things harder on everyone.

The socialist historian RW Tawney captured the wider sense of responsibility for future generations when he said of education, 'What a wise parent would wish for their child, so must the state wish for all its children.' We won't reignite intergenerational solidarity if we entrench resentment across age groups, which is a fundamental prong of this government's re-election platform. The economic divide is real. It's systemic causes are ignored by this government—in fact, in some ways, they are entrenched by this government. What we can do to shift these dynamics is to create shared intergenerational spaces. That could be home-share schemes where elderly people rent out affordable rooms to young people in exchange for a helping hand. That could be nursing homes for 4-year-olds and partner programs for their parents. That could be second act volunteer programs between retirees and young people who need to foster life skills and understand that their community cares for them. We have to think about these matters, because at the moment this government will not. We have to act on these initiatives, because at the moment this government will not. We have to harness the different struggles across the generations as a force for unity before the self-absorbed and self-sustaining government causes these fractures to polarise our community for good.

Progress doesn't move in a straight line. It zigs and zags. In my first speech I spoke about being galvanised through the resistance. Coming up to one year since being elected to the parliament, I want to reflect on what it means to be in opposition. You oppose something by standing up to it, but also by being its opposite. It means being compassionate and inclusive, where they are cold and exclusionary. It means being committed to accuracy and to precision, where they are sloppy with the truth and the facts. Or, when it comes to climate change, it means being at total war with them. It also means preserving your greatest effort for the true battles over the course of our future—battles like this one, battles like intergenerational inequality and preserving the memory of how the people before us have opposed and how they have resisted and how they have won.

With that in mind, I want to turn to a few of the specifics around this afternoon's appropriation bill, which comes at a critical time for our country, when we are at the tail end of the summer of catastrophic bushfires and now we are at the breaking point of a coronavirus pandemic. Labor will be supporting the uncontroversial appropriation of this funding, but my support does not mean that I am giving the LNP government a free pass for their significant economic mismanagement over their seven years in government.

Last week we saw the Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, telling the Prime Minister that he cannot just deport his problems. Prime Minister Ardern's observation of how this government deals with problems is pretty spot on. If there's a problem, this government will just ignore it until it cannot ignore it anymore. Then they will obfuscate until that strategy runs out as well. Finally, they will just cast the blame on others.

They've been very quick to shift the blame on the economy to the bushfires and coronavirus. I'm not denying that they will have a substantial impact on our economy on the scale of which we cannot yet quite understand, but we have to remember that this isn't the government's first nine months in power—it is their seventh year in power. They might shrug their shoulders and they might point their fingers, but Australians remember the economy was floundering before the fires and before coronavirus. Australians haven't just started being hurt by unemployment and skyrocketing electricity prices and completely unmanageable childcare fees in the past few months. We remember because we feel like we haven't caught a break in years. We've been feeling the rising cost of living, and we've been feeling that compounded by economic mismanagement, so I will not allow this government today to use the bushfires and coronavirus as an excuse for not addressing the longstanding challenges that families in my electorate of Lilley, on the north side of Brisbane, have faced for years.

There has been some need for responsible and proportionate and measured stimulus to boost the economy for some time. It's something we've been calling for for nine months. Economic growth was downgraded before the bushfires, before coronavirus. To say the economy is only starting to hurt now doesn't match the facts. And it's not just Labor saying this; it's the RBA, it's business, it's everyday people who come here and look to us for solutions.

In the government's own midyear update from December last year, they downgraded their own expectations for wage growth. Currently wages are growing at one-fifth of the pace of profits. They've not just been stagnant for the past few months; they have now declared through Mathias Cormann, the Minister for Finance, that wages are low by design—low wages are a deliberate part of the government's economic strategy. This must be such a huge relief to the teachers, nurses, retail workers, hospitality workers and tradies across the country who are struggling to get by every week, who are up to their necks in debt because of low wages, to be told by this government to consider their low wages as part of a grand national design.

With low wages, government and household debt together have reached new record highs. This seven-year government has promised a surplus every year, and so far they have delivered deficits every year. Six budgets—not a single surplus. That's pretty shocking for a party who claims their greatest strength is economic management. Gross and net debt have doubled on this government's watch, and what they're not shouting about is that in 2013 under the Labor government net debt was $175 billion—it's now $403 billion. Gross debt under the Labor government in 2013 was $280 billion. Gross debt is now at $570 billion. Most of the debt in the Commonwealth budget is LNP debt. Most of the debt has been accumulated under this LNP government, not under the former Labor government.

At the end of February 2020, the Prime Minister suggested that as we face difficulties in the international economy we need to lean more heavily on the domestic economy. But this suggestion is completely ignorant of the fact that domestic and local economies are hurting too. With record household debt, high unemployment and low wages people cannot afford to go out and spend money at local businesses and in their local high street. Businesses are hurting; local jobs are being cut.

In Lilley, over the past few months alone, we have had Lockheed Martin at Pinkenba shut down operations altogether; we've had Virgin Australia cut 750 jobs from the corporate office on the inner north side; the historic Arnott's—an iconic part of Brisbane's north side—has been sold off to a private US equity giant; Nundah Village has been labelled 'the village of the damned' in the Courier Mail because of all the shopfronts closing down along the village; and last week Tigerair announced that they were closing their Brisbane base, with something in the vicinity of up to 100 jobs that could be lost. These closures hurt local businesses. These closures hurt local jobs. These closures hurt the local economy.

Unemployment is now at a crisis point, with almost two million Australians unable to find work or actively looking for more work. Data from the ABS last week revealed that the unemployment rate has jumped to 5.3 per cent. The RBA recently named a consistent increase in the underemployment rate as the most likely trigger for another interest rate cut, after the RBA slashed rates three times last year to a record low of 0.75 per cent.

Perhaps worst hit by this government's policies are the social services and the people who rely on them. I've said before that this government prefer cuts over compassion. The way this government manage our social services is not like a government but like an external administrator winding up a failing company and putting it into administration.

When it comes to how this government view Centrelink recipients, their actions speak louder than their words. Instead of treating vulnerable Australians with empathy and compassion, this government have introduced demeaning, contemptuous legislation that further stigmatises and isolates people who are down on their luck. They have refused to increase the rate of Newstart above the poverty line, they have sent illegal robodebt notices, they have pushed for mandatory drug tests, they have introduced a cashless card system to control how welfare is spent, and now they are trying to increase the liquid asset test so Australians who are looking for a job have to burn through their savings before they even get to Newstart. How much contempt can one government have for a group of people who are just looking for a hand up? People receiving Centrelink benefits are not the caricatures this government would like you to think they are. They are people like Marcia, who contacted my office because she had stage 3 breast cancer and was told by Centrelink that she needed to go on Newstart because she was not sick enough for the Disability Support Pension!

The LNP have gutted $4.6 billion from the NDIS, leaving Australians with a disability and those who care for them without the support they need. One of my constituents, Karen, who is frequently wheelchair-bound because of a number of illnesses, told me that when a person has several illnesses they tend to get lumped into the too-hard basket by the NDIS and forgotten about by the very service tasked with looking after their welfare.

The LNP cut $2 billion in funding for aged care. The aged-care system is in crisis. There is not one part of the aged-care system that has not been seriously compromised. Two constituents, Joyce and Ray, have both told me they were told they faced a 12-month waiting period for their approved aged-care package. What is the government's response to decrease waiting times? They drip-feed 14,000 new aged-care packages to older Australians, while over 100,000 people are still sitting on the wait list.

The economy is supposed to work for the people, not the other way around. A surplus is pointless if people are struggling to get by. Those opposite are unwilling or unable to show leadership. They refuse to come up with a decent plan. We are seeing, in years of economic weakness, wage stagnation and slowing growth, an absolute failure to address the policy challenges that Australians are asking their federal government to fix. Economic management is what the government prides themselves on. It's what the Prime Minister and the Treasurer asked Australians to trust them with at the 2019 election. Where has that trust got Australians to now? If the government cannot deliver a healthy economy, they have delivered nothing in seven long years. I will close my remarks by noting that millennials are now four out of six in the House of Representatives—a good outcome!

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