Joe Hockey (North Sydney, Liberal Party, Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

I say to the cowering members of the government—the ones who are so loud; the plethora of left-wingers who are parading as neocons today—that they should understand that this is an opportunity to address what has been a structural flaw in the economy for some time. This government has been talking for months and months, and the Prime Minister has been talking for years, about improving productivity. But what has the Prime Minister done about it? Nothing. He has done nothing about improving productivity. The government brought forward the Intergenerational report two years in order to say, ‘We are going to do something about the economy and about productivity.’ The three key aspects of the Intergenerational report are population, participation and productivity in order to drive an increase in real GDP. This government’s solution is to say, ‘We’ll have a big Australia with 36 million people.’ I am just not sure that Australians are willing to embrace it. Do you know why they are not willing to embrace it? They are worried that the next generation of Australians are going to inherit a lesser quality of life than that which we have if the population goes to 36 million.

If you want to know how you can improve GDP growth and participation, I can tell you that one of the ways to do it immediately is to encourage people—those people who have been trained and educated at great cost to the economy—to get back into the workforce and to give them a real incentive to stay in employment. As my leader today enunciated in this place, there is a significant dropout by women once they have a child. One of the things that we need to bear in mind is that, if we want to improve the participation rate in Australia, we have to encourage women to come back to the workforce. One of the ways to do that is to have a generous parental payment scheme that puts in place a mechanism that ensures that those people, if they have a second child, a third child or even, happily, a fourth child or more, will have an opportunity not to be financially punished for having a child. That is what this is about. On no issue in the last two years have I been more convinced than on this issue. I will tell you why. It is because for so long I have worked and fought against discrimination against women in the workforce.

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