Luke Hartsuyker (Cowper, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I must say I am absolutely surprised that the member for Parramatta and the Labor Party could consider our current economic position as some form of happy accident blown along by favourable winds. It really is quite astounding. The member for Lilley has no credibility in economic matters. The member for Lilley has no credibility at all. He is just pursuing policies that are nothing more than rank populism. When it comes to economics, when it comes to sound policy, the member for Lilley, or the supreme rooster, really has nothing to crow about. He is a member of a party that trashed the Australian economy, that left us with $96 billion worth of debt and that pushed interest rates through the roof and threw a million people on the scrap heap.

This government have done the hard yards. We have not been using these favourable winds, as you say, to somehow blow into some wonderful utopian harbour. We have got the budget into surplus through hard work and through the hard work of the Australian people, we have repaid Labor’s debt, we have reduced unemployment to 4½ per cent and we have put in place policies that are going to ensure Australia’s future. We believe there is no future in unemployment, no future in high interest rates and no future in high government debt. The overwhelming body of evidence shows that a more flexible labour market produces superior outcomes for employers, employees and the economy.

But what do the Australian Labor Party propose to do? They want to reintroduce unfair dismissal laws. How is that going to make this country more productive? They want to re-regulate the labour market. How will more regulation make the economy more productive? We are in an economy that is running at capacity. We are pushing the speed limits. This government is implementing policies to smooth out the bumps in the road, to allow the economy to operate at a higher level of speed and to allow it to employ more people. It is dragging the long-term unemployed into the workforce and it is increasing the participation rate, and the ALP wants to turn back the clock. The ALP wants to re-regulate. The ALP wants to lower the speed limits. Lower speed limits mean higher costs to business, increased inflation and increased interest rates. That is what the sort of strategy that the Australian Labor Party is proposing is going to bring to this country.

On skills development this government has introduced the Australian technical college concept—providing quality trade type training to students in years 11 and 12. We have implemented the Skills for the Future program—upskilling mature adults, providing the ability to get into mature age apprenticeships, providing for more engineers and providing for tradespeople to increase their skills. These are tremendous policies. Yet what does the Labor Party think of the Australia technical colleges? Like every reform we introduce, they oppose it. If we propose a reform that will improve this country, they oppose it—just like Australian technical colleges. They are against that.

This government believes that climate change is an issue which is a real challenge to this nation. But we believe it has to be approached in a responsible way. If we are going to implement the sorts of policies that will take this country forward and ensure our future, our response to climate change has to be sustainable. The Australian Labor Party is tending to adopt a sort of magic pudding approach, where miraculously you can reduce greenhouse gases, you can save the world and it will cost no-one anything—not a dollar. It is all going to come for free—just listen to the member for Kingsford Smith. It does not seem to cost anything, or at least he has not worked that out anyway.

Labor’s climate change policy has three pillars: firstly, destroying the coal industry; secondly, ratifying Kyoto; and, thirdly, praying for renewables. It really is a magic pudding policy. We believe that the Kyoto protocol certainly is not the solution to climate change. It fact, the NUS Consulting Group study on electricity costs showed that, for instance, in the United Kingdom in the year 2005-06 electricity costs to commercial consumers went up 41½ per cent. Many of the European countries encountered huge increases in power in 2005-06. But the member for Kingsford Smith does not seem to know what climate change is going to cost. This government believes we need a balanced approach. We need continued economic reform. We have to meet the challenges of climate change on a basis that is economically sustainable.

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