Dennis Jensen (Tangney, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Textile, Clothing and Footwear Investment and Innovation Programs Amendment Bill 2014, as it is emblematic of what this government is all about and emblematic of what Liberals are all about. It is about an end to corporate welfare. Corporate welfare has to end today. The age of entitlement is over. There is no going back. No matter how the whingers-in-chief opposite would like to fantasise, there is no other road, no other option. This bill is indicative of the only game in town.

I would like to take this opportunity to educate members opposite, or anyone with the malady of a Labor mindset: free trade is the only game in town. The history of the world has given us one very clear lesson. That lesson is that the best way to help our fellow Australians is to grow the pie, not fret over who gets the biggest slice. We want to guarantee that everyone gets a slice and that the slices get bigger every single year. Like the old adage goes: a rising tide lifts all boats.

On the specifics of the bill—before I move into a broader, more discursive schooling of Labor Luddites—the Textile, Clothing and Footwear Investment and Innovation Programs Amendment Bill 2014 will amend the Textile, Clothing, and Footwear Investment and Innovation Programs Act 1999 to provide for the closure of the Clothing and Household Textile Building Innovative Capability Scheme, or BIC scheme, and the Textiles, Clothing and Footwear Small Business Program, TCF SBP, on 30 June 2014.

The industry and innovation creativity of this government has identified page after page of savings—millions and millions of dollars of savings. By trusting people, by trusting the magic of the market, this Liberal government will save $25 million, as a start from 2015-2016, by moving to greater free trade in the textile area.

Government funding support has been provided to the textile, clothing, and footwear manufacturing industry for many years. Well, that game is over. There is a new team in charge. It is time for the ending of corporate welfarism, just as effectively and brilliantly as we are ending welfare careerism in the social sphere. The social welfare system should never be a career choice for anyone, be they in business or in the social community. There is a contract, a social contract. Our government will restore integrity and trust in the contract between government and business.

Textile, Clothing and Footwear—herein TCF, TCFS—tariffs have been lowered, in stages, over many years. The tariff on clothing is now 10 per cent and this will fall to five per cent on 1 January 2015. The tariff on textiles and footwear is already five per cent. In many cases these tariffs are already effectively further reduced by the range of trade agreements Australia is party to and by concessions provided to some trading partners which qualify under developing country status.

Let me be clear: I welcome and congratulate the government, and especially the Minister for Trade, for his industry perseverance and vision. For the minister knows that rear-view-mirror investing and rear-view-mirror policymaking, much like the whole Labor movement, should be put on the scrap heap of history.

One cannot plan the next 50 years on what happened in the last 50 years. Liberals know this and have a plan. How ironic, then, is it that the only plan that is sustainable, given how much Labor and their masters the Greens crow about sustainability, is the Liberal plan? Sustainable economic policy means becoming economic in the sphere in which you operate, gaining comparative advantage and exploiting that advantage through trade. That is the only way. It should not come as a revelation to Labor members. This basic common sense was put into that wonderful book by Adam Smith The Wealth of Nations, in 1776. 1776! The Labor Party have had 238 years to get the message. And they still do not get it. Why else are they still insisting their members swear their loyalty to enacting socialisation of industry? The only game in town is free trade. However, I am not foolhardy. I know that some countries have trade barriers and often so have many of our regional trading partners. They have conditions and tariffs on our products. But the solution this government has on the table is one that looks to the future, not to the past. We work to get all our regional partners inside the free-trade boat. Remember those rising tides! That is what is happening today with the talks in relation to Trans-Pacific Partnership. This is a sustainable and forward-looking plan. What is the alternative?

Let us examine it for the sake of fun. We continue to honour Gresham's law that you cannot throw good money after bad. Uneconomic enterprises today will only become more uneconomic tomorrow. This will hold true if there is a fundamental systemic issue and, if no restructuring has occurred, why should anything be different? That is the definition of madness: repeating the same experiment time and again, hoping for a different result.

So we could continue the Labor madness and continue to prove right a dead economist. That would prop up jobs in the union-heavy electorates in which these Labor members squat. It cannot be stated loudly or clearly enough. It is one thing to burn money when it is your own money; it is another thing to burn money when it is borrowed money. And this is the public's money.

Even if this government wanted to just give money to rickety old workshops in Victoria, because that is what governments have always done, where is that money going to come from? Thanks to the former Labor government, our nation is drowning in a sea of red, with debt and deficits as far as the eye can see—wave after wave. Each month we go cap in hand to the world, just to keep the lights on. That is the Labor legacy. Every single month Australia is borrowing $l billion, just to pay the interest on Labor's debt—that is, a family of four paying $2,000 annually just to pay the interest on the debt that Labor foisted on the Australian people. So how does it make sense to borrow even more money to give it out in corporate welfare? It does not, it never has and it never will. I could not be happier that, in the Prime Minister and Treasurer, we have a team that have the moral courage and testicular fortitude to call time on this nonsense.

There is no way that the Australian government, either this one or any other coalition government, could happily look any voter in the eye and say that $1 billion in interest every month is money well spent. Dreaming! Labor need to get their head out of the first-class clouds and their hands out of the unions' pocket. They need to wake up to the economic realities of the 21st century. Socialism is dead and there is only one game in town.

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