Ed Husic (Chifley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

As the member for Bass says, they love tax—and they certainly love putting this levy on. How does that improve competitiveness in this nation? The shadow Treasurer made a remark about free markets and advocating free markets, which I thought was a refreshing change and I welcome his new-found love of free markets. When we introduced a method of moving to a market based price on carbon, those opposite actually wanted to stop that. They want to subsidise polluters—pay $5 billion out of government coffers to polluters—and yet there is this additional cost to the government and also the fact that it will do little, if anything, in terms of cutting emissions and will make it even harder for them to make the bipartisan target we both agreed within this place that we will cut emissions by five per cent by 2020—but no reference to it.

I come to the other thing that they talk about. When they talk about costs, bear in mind the biggest cost in a business is labour. The thing that those opposite had a problem with when skill shortages were driving up labour costs was that the only way they could fix it was to bring in a draconian set of industrial laws that undermined the ability of labour to negotiate enterprise agreements on wages and conditions. Work Choices was their way of dealing with their own inability to rein in labour cost increases because of skill shortages. Those opposite also talk about regulation. The biggest thing that they did, in terms of cutting regulation, was to bring in a GST that made two million small businesses tax collection points across the country. You never hear that from them either. So if you are going to talk about competitiveness, look at their record, look at the way that they performed in government and recognise— (Time expired)

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