Craig Emerson (Rankin, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Trade) Share this | Hansard source

Australians will recall that after the election the Leader of the Opposition gathered his shadow cabinet together in September and declared in front of the waiting media, ‘We are a government in waiting.’ He expected government then to fall into his lap. He believed that, consistent with the born to rule mentality of the coalition parties, all he had to do was insist that the Independents come on board, because that is what coalition political parties do—they believe they have a natural right to rule. The problem is that the Independents did not accept the edict delivered by the Leader of the Opposition that they had an obligation to join him and to form a government. From that point, the opposition leader spat the dummy out—in a beautiful arc. He spat the dummy out and they have been looking for it ever since. He has been conducting these tantrums day by day, week in, week out because he just cannot believe it happened, that the born to rule mentality of the Liberal Party did not get him up, that the Independents and other members of this parliament did not join him and give him his natural birthright—that is, the position of Prime Minister of Australia. From that moment, when the dummy went out in this beautiful, gorgeous arc, he resolved to seek to wreck, to stop and to destroy any good initiatives in this parliament.

Fortunately, despite all the threats, all the bravado—he was going to stop all of our legislation—he has been unable to stop any of our legislation because our legislation is being assessed by the Independent members of this parliament and they are passing the legislation, but over the dead bodies of the Leader of the Opposition and those who sit opposite. The opposition leader and the member for Canning say, ‘We are but a heartbeat away from government; it is going to come to us.’ You would think if that were the natural order of things, as they believe it is, then of course they would have some policies. But we had confirmed again today that they have no policies. In place of policies they have three-word slogans. In fact I think they have choir practice. They get together to recite their three-word slogans and if anyone gets it wrong they will be called up to the office and told to stand in the corner and ‘recite our three-word slogans till you get them right’. They had another slogan today. It was so useless, so pathetic, I have forgotten it. But there it was, and we will hear it again and again—and you are going to get the cane from headmaster Abbott if you do not get it right. That is the coalition’s pathetic excuse for policies.

The truth is that this is supposed to be a debate about the economy and about an economic reform program. Let us look at the difficulties that were left for the Australian economy by 12 years of wanton neglect by the coalition. A key indicator of the future prosperity of any country must be the productivity performance of that country, because today’s productivity growth is tomorrow’s prosperity. Eighty per cent of the prosperity increases in income per Australian over the last 40 years is directly attributable to productivity growth. What happened to productivity growth during these 12 desolate years? After the productivity boom of the 1990s, created out of the economic reform program of the Hawke and Keating governments, labour productivity growth averaged 2.1 per cent per annum. During the period of the coalition, average labour productivity growth fell from 2.1 per cent per annum to 1.4 per cent.

Another important measure of productivity is called ‘multifactor productivity growth’. Of course, the opposition leader had no idea what that would mean. It is basically a measure of the ingenuity, innovation and increase in expertise and knowledge of an economy. What happened the last four years of the coalition government? Was it small? Was it zero? That would be bad. No, it was negative. At the end of the period of the previous government, Australia was less productive than it was four years beforehand. The cause of that is the complete absence of a productivity-raising agenda and the consequence was this. This is a diagram which indicates Australia’s productivity growth performance as a percentage of that of the United States, which is regarded as being at the productivity frontier. Members on this side of the parliament will see this boom created by the Labor government—and now, to quote the author of this graph, ‘Relative to the US, Australian labour productivity is back to where it was in 1990.’ It is a desert. We are back to where we started because of the lack of a productivity-raising agenda, and that is what the Australian Labor Party, the Gillard government, is seeking to deal with.

We should not be surprised because, as the Minister for Health and Ageing, the Leader of the Opposition actually said this about health reform: ‘No-one should fret about an unreformed health system.’ He was the health minister for years and he concluded at the end of it that no-one should fret about an unreformed health system. He had no interest in reforming the health system.

Here we were, three booms under the coalition: the first boom was the tech boom, followed by a housing boom, followed by a mining boom. You reckon they would have invested some of the proceeds of three booms into the capacity constraints that were confronting the Australian economy, namely, skill shortages and infrastructure. No, there was an infrastructure drought in this country and the coalition invested virtually nothing in skills development in this country. The Leader of the Opposition then said, ‘Hold on, we have got a reform program’—by the way, it is three words; you should not be surprised—‘and our reform program is real tax reform.’ When he delivered the Deakin lecture—you might recall when the Prime Minister was talking about economic Hansonism the Leader of the Opposition said, like the Monkees, ‘I am a reformer too; yea look at me I am a reformer’—he said, ‘The most attractive of the Henry recommendations was to increase the tax-free threshold to $25,000 and to have a flat rate from that point to an income of $180,000 a year.’

So here is the opposition leader saying, ‘That’s it, that’s real tax reform, that’s our program.’ The problem was it did not even last two feeds by the shadow Treasurer before he said, ‘Oh, we’ve had a look at it and it’s got hairs on it.’ This did not last two meals from the shadow Treasurer before they dumped their version of real tax reform. It did not last a day. Then, of course, we have heard from the opposition leader today saying, ‘We’ve got a health reform policy—local hospital boards.’  That is it—local hospital boards. That is the health policy. Local hospital boards—how many words is that? It is always three words—have you noticed that?

The truth is that this government is investing in productivity-raising reform issues and agenda items. It is investing in Australia’s education and health systems. We are providing up to 711,000 training places to deal with the acute skills shortage created by the neglect of the coalition when in government. We will be investing in university education, we have the My School website and we have, for the first time, some transparency in the school education system by paying the best teachers to go to the toughest schools. These are very important reforms. By the way, a number of them again are opposed by the coalition. We are investing in innovation—

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