Craig Laundy (Reid, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It has been a frustrating week. On Monday, we had, I think, a secret plan on education. On Tuesday, we had a secret plan on hospitals. Today, according to the member for Kingston and now the member for Charlton, we have a secret plan on jobs. Is it jobs? Yes, jobs and vocational training.

The frustrating part is that we are having a review into Federation. It is a green paper. It is actually a discussion paper. It is a process. It needs to be dealt with with state and local governments. This Federation of ours is 114 years old. It needs to be reviewed. We have structural budget deficit issues. We have massive duplications of resources occurring at all three levels of government. Our resources are finite. Hence the fact that we have the structural budget deficit. Instead of ruling things in and out and playing games, we need to have a sensible conversation between all three levels of government on a very simple concept—who does what and who pays for what. I would like to add a third—who regulates and monitors compliance.

After 23 years of employing people and bouncing around between all three levels of government in this country, I can tell you that it is tough to employ people. The topic of the debate is the government failing to prepare Australians for the jobs of the new economy. Here is a newsflash: I believe this topic should be the government failing to prepare Australians to create the jobs of the new economy. This House does not understand enough, in my humble opinion, that it is not government that creates jobs; it is today's employers who become tomorrow's small business operators and make their way through to become medium-sized and large business operators. That is hard. I do not know how to do it. I do not have the answers. I am not an educator. But we need to better target our education to foster, find and promote the entrepreneurial flair that sits inside tomorrow's small business operator.

How are we as a government trying to do that? We heard the parliamentary secretary for communications talk about employee share schemes. The reality of the changes that the former government made was that a vehicle that could be used to give ground level entry to an employee and ownership in a potential business of the future, a great transitioning tool, was taxed upon issue rather than upon redemption. Guess what? If an employee on $55,000 or $60,000 a year who is given options in a business does not have the capital to pay the capital gain on them in year 1, they will not do it. Hence the changes we have made are sensible. It was how the system was and will always be. It is how today's employees can use a tool to become tomorrow's entrepreneurs. It is a good system.

I like this term 'new economy'. A job is a job is a job. Our economy changes every day. There are opportunities every day. Our job as government is to get out of the way and allow people to take risks. This goes back to why the green paper is so important and why the monitoring and compliance side of the green paper is so important. Just like any regulatory burden you add has to be paid for by a business and is actually a disincentive, the more you can take out of the way of business the more incentive there is for it to have a go.

Among the budget initiatives is the small business package. Irrespective of what that small business is, it can take advantage of a decrease in company tax rates and instant asset write-offs. The member for Cunningham mentioned TAFE. In my former role I worked with RTOs to make our own cert III and cert IV hospitality courses that we could offer to our staff because TAFE did not fit our business model. These are all things that we should do. This is a most worthwhile debate to have. Today's employees are tomorrow's entrepreneurs, and we need to foster and inflame their passion— (Time expired)

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