Steven Ciobo (Moncrieff, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am certainly pleased to have the opportunity to rise on this address-in-reply to the Governor-General’s address. I have the very fantastic privilege of representing again, for what is now my fourth term, the people of Moncrieff, based on the Gold Coast.

The story of the Gold Coast is one I have told in this parliament on many occasions. It is a story about a city that has grown rapidly in the last 50 years. It has been Australia’s fastest-growing city for around three decades and it is forecast to continue to be one of Australia’s fastest-growing cities. It is a city that has been built off the back of the effort, sweat and contribution of people who have been willing to roll up their sleeves and to really attempt to realise their dreams with respect to both enterprise and the social infrastructure that they would like to see in a city like the Gold Coast.

It is a colourful city, comprised of a great mix of people, all of whom have got a story to tell and have come from diverse parts of this country and, indeed, diverse parts of the globe. From my perspective, to have such a unique opportunity to represent them in this, the pinnacle of our democracy, our nation’s federal parliament, is truly a wonderful, wonderful privilege. I am very, very grateful for the trust that the people of my electorate put in me.

The last federal election was certainly the most hotly contested election that I have been a part of. As someone who has been a student of politics for nearly 20 years, the last federal election was one where we knew that both the Labor government and the coalition thought that it was going to be a tight election. That is the reason that there was so much focus and emphasis placed upon the respective policy positions that were enunciated by the leaders of our two major political parties. That is the reason that people took particular interest in the vision, the goals and the direction that the two leaders, Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott, were attempting to take our nation.

For me, it was also a chance to maturely contribute to the development of policy on behalf of the coalition in the shadow portfolio role that I had at the time with respect to tourism, the arts, youth and sport. That too was a great opportunity and indeed a privilege. To have seen policy positions I had worked on over a number of years developed in collaboration with stakeholders and interested parties from around Australia and to have the opportunity to feed that into what I hoped was relevant policy that would be of benefit not only locally in my own electorate but also more broadly across the country was something that excited me. It was a privilege to have the opportunity to be on the front line when it came to campaigning not only again in my seat of Moncrieff but also in a number of seats across the country and to have the chance to be an advocate for change and reform that I believed was warranted, based on the hundreds and hundreds of conversations that I had had with interested parties throughout the time. This was for me a unique aspect, one I had not encountered previously in the 2010 federal election.

But we know now from history that the outcome was a minority government. We know now that the Independents chose to go with the Australian Labor Party. I think at this point it is opportune to reflect on what that means both in the government’s performance in its previous term and in the government’s performance in its current term. The address that was delivered by the Governor-General—instructed by the government of the day and in particular, of course, the Prime Minster—outlined Labor’s plans for the future of this nation.

It has been remarked that when you change a government you change the fate of the nation. That is certainly the case, because we saw in 2007 at the federal election the handover of power after 12 years from the coalition to the Australian Labor Party. We saw a profound change move across the country—a profound change that in many respects was not anticipated. The reason it was not anticipated was that at the 2007 election the then leader of the Australian Labor Party, the federal member for Griffith, Kevin Rudd, said that he was basically a conservative when it came to economics and that he was essentially going to continue many of the policies of the former Howard government—with some notable exceptions of course, the Work Choices policy being one of them.

What transpired over the previous parliament was a Labor agenda that has been rolled out across this nation the impact of which was compounded by the global financial crisis which took place. We saw, under the cloak of the global financial crisis, a rhetoric emerge from the leadership group of the Australian Labor Party that really fitted with what the Prime Minister at that point described as almost a social democratic compact. We saw the evolution of government in this country to an even bigger behemoth. We saw government look at the introduction of new taxes. We saw government go on a spending spree that this country had not seen since World War II.

As a direct consequence of this Labor government we saw a situation now where Australia moved from being in a net asset position with having built up large surpluses and stockpiles of taxpayers’ funds to ensure that we had money available to invest, for example, with our Higher Education Endowment Fund, with money being made available for hospitals and for Medicare and with the Commonwealth finally starting to meet some of its unmet liabilities through the Future Fund. These were crucial funds that the previous coalition government worked on but within the course of less than 24 months the Labor Party undid a decade of good work. Within the course of 24 months the Labor Party had spent the entire surplus, had spent the money that had been saved up for a whole raft of different initiatives such as higher education and Medicare, and the Labor Party presided over a sharp increase in the unemployment rate which saw the unemployment rate move from its record 33-year low of 3.9 per cent upwards towards six per cent.

That was the legacy of this Australian Labor Party. That was what Labor’s achievement was, cloaked at the time with so many hollow promises that were delivered to the Australian people. We saw a government that went to the Australian people and said: ‘We will do something about grocery prices. We will do something about fuel prices. We will do something about the cost of living.’ What did they actually do? Apart from political posturing they did very little. What we saw was a failed Fuelwatch, a failed GroceryWatch and a raft of other announcements like that, all of which were quickly jettisoned.

So in 2010 it did not particularly surprise me that only weeks out from election day our Prime Minister said to the Australian people that she had no plans to introduce a carbon tax and indeed would not be doing it. What do we now see less than two months after the election? We see that firmly on the agenda is a committee focused on the introduction of a carbon tax.

We know that this centre-left Prime Minister with a centre-left cabinet, controlled in many respects by a Greens party that is now emerging as a very influential force when it takes the balance of power in the Senate as of 1 July next year, has a focus on a profound change to the structure of this country. We saw that this Labor government had a plan to tax the goose that had, for this nation, laid the golden egg. Our mining and resources industry is not something that we ought to take for granted. Australia’s mining and resources industry is an industry that has been achieved through the risk of capital and the effort of men and women to ensure that Australia is being competitive in some respects and able to supply our natural resources globally. That is very much under threat now by a government that has spent so much money in such a short period of time that it is now required to put up taxes to try to overcome the fact that it has such a huge deficit that needs to be turned around.

I must say that in the long term, when I as the father of a 23-month-old consider that Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard are responsible for him now having a share of public debt worth some $7,000 or $9,000, I really wonder what right the Australian Labor Party believes it has to put future generations of Australians into debt. It is nothing if not the height of selfishness that the Australian Labor Party believes it is justified in ramming this country into substantial debt and deficit to pursue its social outcomes. It is arrogance to leave the hard lifting to those that will follow. I think it is a great shame that the Australian Labor Party was successful when it came to saying to the Australian people that it could for all intents and purposes do what it wanted and we would worry about the ramifications and repercussions down the track. That, to me, is a form of government that I believe the Labor Party should be ashamed of.

I think it is simply unacceptable that in debates in the parliament, for example, we have Australian Labor Party members that would stand up and speak of projects in their electorates, crow about how they were supplying this school hall or undertaking this building activity or that rollout of pink batts or broadband, and say to the Australian people, ‘If you don’t want it, vote for the coalition.’ The reality is that there is an asterisk after every one of those offers, and the asterisk that was behind every single one of those statements that were made by the Australian Labor Party was that there was a debt associated with that as well.

More recently, I went to the opening of a new school hall that Labor paid for under its Building the Education Revolution program and that the Labor senator at the time stood up and spoke and crowed about, saying what vision it was to have invested in this particular school project. When I had the opportunity to speak to those children at that school hall and to speak to the parents of those children, I made one point very clearly. I said to them that they should utilise that hall as much as possible, because the children that sat on the floor below the stage, in grades 6 and 7, are the children that are going to be repaying the debt on that hall for the next decade or more. They are the children who will have to spend a decade or more repaying the largesse of this government before they are even at the point where they are able to start to invest their taxpayers’ dollars in future infrastructure. When you consider that for 12 years we attempted to pay off $96 billion of Labor Party debt, and in two years the Australian Labor Party has ramped that debt back up to around $95 billion, that is the legacy that ought to be challenged head on.

I think that, in the fullness of time, the Australian people will judge the latest iterations of Labor’s so-called nation-building projects very harshly. As to the single largest project, the National Broadband Network that Labor is looking at rolling out—a $43 billion network that, for all intents and purposes, nationalises telecommunications in this country again, running contrary to the last 100 years of experience around the globe—they too will question the wisdom of that decision.

I do not dispute for one moment that there are political points to be gained in promising all things to all people. I do not dispute that the Labor Party love walking around their electorates and other electorates saying what visionaries they are for building the National Broadband Network. But I do dispute one thing. In the fullness of time, as this nation, mired in debt, is forced to make hard decisions about what we will do without so we can start to repay the debt, just so we can get back to zero, people will not be quite as grateful as the Labor Party would like them to be.

I come from a services based city. The Gold Coast is a city that does not have government departments. It is built on the free enterprise of its people. It is the small business capital of this nation. It is a city that is built on property development and, as I said, the tourism industry. For our city, the current spending of the Labor government is nothing but bad news. Our city is unlike other parts of this nation where there is a focus on resources, energy and agriculture—the industries and sectors of the economy that are performing relatively strongly. The people of cities like the Gold Coast, which have no agricultural, mining or resource benefits, are the ones who pay the price. In the economic framework as it is at present, we have the Reserve Bank consistently saying that it needs to do something about wage-price inflation and about the more rigid reregulation of the labour force—which in the longer term will also force up wages and cause wage-price inflation to spiral upwards. The consequence is that the Reserve Bank is rapidly putting up interest rates. We have seen six or seven interest-rate increases in the past 12 or so months.

To compound the problem, we have seen the banks move well and truly beyond the official cash rate increase that the Reserve Bank has imposed. Every time that happens, a city like the Gold Coast, with no benefits from agriculture, mining or resources, does it even tougher, because if the Australian dollar goes up, thanks to the interest-rate increases, we are less competitive when it comes to tourism. And, with every interest-rate increase, there is less aggregate demand for the property development industry and less demand for the services industry across the coast. This–and I will certainly reflect on these remarks years from now—I believe is the legacy that, unfortunately, the Gold Coast will need to overcome.

With respect to the actual campaign, I cannot thank enough the hundreds and hundreds of volunteers who came out to man my booths in Moncrieff on election day. To those who laboured for long, long hours, both on election day itself and prior to that at pre-polling, I say a very heartfelt and sincere thank you. I had a fantastic campaign team: Kylie Hart was my campaign director and Nick McAlpine was my campaign manager. These two staff members made all the difference to me. They were dedicated, well and truly beyond anything that I would ask of them—dedicated to the belief that we needed a change of government to get Australia back on the right track. For their hard work and their constant, seven-days-a-week work for the entire duration of the campaign—as well as, of course, all the weekends prior to that—I say thank you. I thank Alistair Mitchell, my adviser in the shadow tourism portfolio I had. Alistair was a source of invaluable advice for me on all matters related to policy and matters political. I simply cannot thank him enough for his dedication, not only to his role but also to me. I thank Mike Bruce, my local media adviser and also portfolio media adviser, for his great work, though he had only been with the team for a relatively short period of time. And of course I thank Helen Lewis, my office manager, for her contribution to the campaign.

In addition, I must thank my family—in particular my wife, Astra, and my little son, Asher. I do what I do because I sincerely believe that it makes a difference. I particularly hope it will make a difference in Asher’s life as he grows up. As all of us in this parliament know, our spouses truly are the ones who do the heavy lifting. I simply want to put on record my heartfelt and sincere thanks to Astra for all the nights when she is by herself, for the times when even when I am home it is only for a fleeting moment and for all the times when she, frankly, puts up with demands that I put on her which are well and truly beyond what would be considered reasonable. Finally, to my family more broadly—my mum and dad and everybody who came down to help on the campaign—I give a very heartfelt and serious thankyou to you as well.

Although the coalition was unsuccessful, falling just short of what was required for victory at this election, I fervently believe that we laid in place the framework and did the groundwork required to ensure that at the next federal election we will, I hope, emerge victorious.

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